March 2011 Newsletter
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most
intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable
to change.”
- Charles Darwin
In this issue:
* While Britain Loosens Big Brother’s Grip, US Keeps Civil Liberties
Curtailed
* Scary Stuff – Internet ‘kill switch’ bill gets a makeover
* Breaking News! ID card data crushed
* Good News – ‘Big blow to police powers’
* Did you know? Information Commissioner hits London
councils with GBP150k fine
* ACLU slams Chicago’s pervasive surveillance system
* Food for thought
* Horror Stories – Is this the next generation of Taser?
Prison to test new laser beam to ‘burn’ fighting inmates
* The District of Criminals – Obama assertion: FBI can
get phone records without oversight
* The Sweet Sound of Cash
* Police State – Want Lunch? Give Us Your Fingerprints
* Red Hot Product!
* Advisory – France wants new global finance system
* Big Brother High
* Dumbing Down – Prostitutes Use Facebook to Drum Up Business
* Dumb signs – DHS Seizes Websites for Merely LINKING to
Copyrighted Material
* Dumb facts – Cambridge University stands up for academic
freedom
* Dumb criminal acts – Atlanta police agreed to back
off citizens who videotape
* Darwin Awards
* Unbelievable Dumbing Down – Smoking In The Park Banned,
Ticketed For Cussing In Class And 14 Other Examples Of How
Big Brother Is Systematically Ripping Our Liberties And
Freedoms Away
* In Shadow of a Past Failure, BSA Database Overhaul Takes
Shape
* Patriot Act extension fails in the House by seven votes
* Cannon Fodder – Judge’s Husband Fined $50K Over Homestead
Exemption
* Oz Corner
* Bug Bites – The Dirty Little Secrets of Search
* Currency exchange: baby boomer expats send wave of money
flooding back into Britain The number of people selling property
abroad to buy back home is rising steeply.
* Shamrock’s Missive
* Tid Bits – Tax Exodus Begins
* Quotes
* Tid Bits – The Social Security Disaster
* Bits n bobs – Food Crisis 2011?
* Gov’t Considering Rolling Back Rule Allowing Private Planes
to Keep Flights Secret
* Letters to the Editor
* Quote of the month!
* PT Shamrock’s Exclusive Member’s Site!
*** While Britain Loosens Big Brother’s Grip, US Keeps Civil
Liberties Curtailed
- Matthew Harwood
About a decade before the American Revolution, England’s Great
Commoner, William Pitt the Elder, laid down one of the more eloquent
boundary lines between the individual and the state. “The poorest man
may in his cottage bid defiance to all forces of the Crown,” he said.
“It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it;
the storms may enter, the rain may enter – but the King of England
cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the
ruined tenement!”
Pitt’s rhetoric is one of the more enduring expressions of the
Anglo-American tradition of civil liberties – the idea that people
should be allowed to go about their lives unmolested unless they pose
a threat to the freedom and safety of others. At their purest, these
freedoms are protected regardless of race, religion, sex or class.
Yet since 19 jihadists turned four airliners into suicide missiles,
both the United States and the United Kingdom curtailed foundational
liberties and undermined the rule of law in favor of aggressive
security policies whose proponents claim prevent further attacks. The
eventual pushback against these policies on both sides of the pond
inevitably occurred, coalescing around traditional party politics over
the last two years. In 2008, then-senator Barack Obama won the White
House, promising a return to American values and causing even some
libertarians to cheer that basic liberties would be restored. On
the campaign trail, Obama promised to revisit the Patriot Act,
eliminate warrantless wiretaps and shut down the prison facility at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
A similar desire for change crossed the Atlantic last year.
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron took residence at 10 Downing
Street and formed a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats,
pledging to restore the country’s commitment to individual rights and
the rule of law. Both the Conservative Party and the Liberal
Democrats were blunt in their criticism – far more so than American
politicians – that their country had degenerated into a “surveillance
state” under the rule of New Labour’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. In
their respective 2010 campaign manifestos, each party pledged to beat
back Big Brother, with the Liberal Democrats promising to “protect and
restore your freedoms.”
But only one country’s government seems serious about its pledge to
uphold a semblance of classical liberal values: Britain’s odd
coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. First, Home
Secretary Theresa May allowed the power of police to detain terrorism
suspects without charge to revert back to a maximum of 14 days, from
28 days, after the extended power expired – which still represents an
extraordinary police power in a democracy. (For instance, in the US,
Germany and South Africa, a person can only be detained for 48 hours
before he or she must be released. Even Russia is more liberal in
this regard, limiting precharge detention to five days.)
Then, less than 48 hours later, May released the government review of
the country’s most controversial counterterrorism and security
policies, which she began last summer when the coalition took
power.[5] In the foreword, May stated that the UK has gone too far
down the road toward authoritarianism. “We must,” she wrote, “correct
the imbalance that has developed between the State’s security powers
and civil liberties, restoring those liberties wherever possible and
focusing those powers where necessary.”
Besides allowing precharge detention powers to return to the former
lower maximum of 14 days, May said the government would end police’s
counterterrorism power to stop and search, without suspicion, any
person in certain defined public areas. According to the review, the
power to stop and search without suspicion was abused and fueled
distrust and anger from the UK’s Asian-Muslim communities without
verifiable results. Between 2007 and 2010, police recorded 392,000
stop and searches. Despite this sizable campaign, the power has never
resulted in a conviction for a terrorist offense. May recommended
that stop and search be more tightly constrained and based upon a
police officer’s reasonable suspicion. Curtailing this power in
particular could help the UK government’s relationship with its
minority Muslim population. In an equality impact assessment
accompanying the report, the Home Office noted that stop and search
policy changes will likely improve relations with UK Muslims,
considering that they “feel that the current power is used unequally
against them as a group.”
May also recommended real change in local authorities’ ability to
covertly surveil the public without any judicial oversight. While the
power was intended to address serious crimes and terrorism, May notes
that local governments used the power to catch citizens whose dog
relieved itself in the wrong place, or to check whether a family
resided in the right school district. Under May’s recommendations,
local authorities can use surveillance powers when reserved only for
what Britons consider serious crimes – those that carry at least six
months in jail – and only after receiving a magistrate’s approval.
The final and most draconian state power May reviewed was control
orders. Introduced as emergency legislation in 2005, control orders
allowed the government to place terrorism suspects under virtual house
arrest without charge. Controlled suspects could be relocated, placed
under curfew for up to 16 hours a day, electronically tagged for
tracking, barred from traveling to certain areas and forbidden from
using communication tools like cell phones and the Internet. The idea
behind control orders was to restrict the ability of suspects to
engage in terrorist activity when the government could not charge them
with a crime or deport them. This method of control inverted the
British tradition of actually charging suspects with a crime before
limiting their basic freedoms, denied suspects their right to a fair
trial and placed them in legal limbo. As May’s review acknowledged,
“control orders can mean that prosecution and conviction (a principal
purpose of our counter-terrorism work) becomes less not more likely.”
Control orders also, many argue, made Britain less safe. Of the 45
people put under control orders, seven disappeared. The civil rights
organization Liberty called these disappearances “not just
embarrassing for the Government, they also pose a potentially grave
threat to our security” – which is why, in their 2010 manifesto, the
Liberal Democrats pledged to “scrap control orders” because “the best
way to combat terrorism is to prosecute terrorists, not give away
hard-won British freedoms.”
Despite the Liberal Democrats pledge and May’s acknowledgement that
the current control order regime can be dangerous to liberty and
security, the coalition decided to revise, rather than eradicate,
control orders. The new powers, which have been rebranded Terrorism
Prevention and Investigation Measures (T-Pim) and are already
derisively known as “control orders lite,” will ease restrictions on
terrorism suspects, end forced relocation and place tighter
regulations on the government. For instance, Britain’s High Court
will now review all T-Pims imposed on suspects by the Home Secretary
and will have the power to “quash or revoke” them if they are found
unjustified.
Nevertheless, individuals not charged with a crime can still find
themselves electronically tagged and their freedoms restricted. T-Pim
is obviously still a very dangerous state power that far exceeds
democratic norms of due process and straightjackets individual rights.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote Anglo-American Thomas Paine in 1789, “I
consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man,
by which a government can be held to the principles of its
constitution.” In other words, punishment cannot come before
conviction by one’s peers.
Naturally, civil libertarians and critics fret that the
recommendations don’t go far enough, and appropriately so in regards
to control orders. However, as Queen’s Counsel Matthew Ryder wrote
in the Guardian, while the counterterrorism review is a small
step, it is a necessary and heartening one.
“There is renewed confidence in giving proper weight to civil
liberties concerns,” he wrote of the government. “If this filters
down to how surveillance and anti-terrorist powers are exercised in
practice, there will be real change.”
Ken Macdonald, a former director of public prosecutions known for his
liberal-left politics, provided independent oversight of the Home
Office’s review and concluded that May’s review achieved the
“government’s primary aim of rolling back State power.” In his
report’s introduction, he made his sympathies clear.
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“The first duty of the State is to protect its citizens and so it is
rarely difficult to justify increasing State power,” he wrote. “But
the promise of total security is an illusion that would destroy
everything that makes living worthwhile.”
Despite their shortcomings, May’s reforms show that compromise between
Conservatives and Liberal Democrats has tipped the balance between
civil liberties and security back toward the citizenry. While
Parliament still needs to debate the review’s recommendations, the
coalition government has the votes necessary to pass May’s reforms.
This type of principled civil libertarianism, however, has not
surfaced among the US’s political class. The White House’s promise to
close down Gitmo has been abandoned, meaning preventive detention
continues[8]; warrantless wiretapping goes on[9]; and the Patriot Act
looks likely to be renewed[10], despite recent resistance among some
Democrats and Republicans – about one-third of them Tea Partiers. In
response, notable civil libertarians have pummeled President Obama’s
record on civil liberties and privacy. In a widely circulated quote
from June 2010, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Executive
Director Anthony Romero told liberal activists: “I’m disgusted with
this president.”
Recently, Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional attorney and
blogger at Salon.com, outlined why he is dismayed by the Obama White
House by comparing the similarities – state secrets, targeted
killings, indefinite detention, renditions, denying habeas corpus
rights – between the Bush and Obama White Houses:
[T]his continuity extends beyond specific policies into the underlying
sloganeering mentality in which they’re based,” writes Greenwald.
“[W]e’re in a Global War; the whole Earth is the Battlefield; the
Terrorists want to kill us because they’re intrinsically Evil (not in
reaction to anything we do); we’re justified in doing anything and
everything to eradicate Them; the President’s overarching obligation
(contrary to his Constitutional oath) is to keep us Safe; this should
all be kept secret from us; we can’t be bothered with obsolete dogma
like Due Process and Warrants, etc. etc.
Nevertheless, there’s still a small cause for hope among American
civil libertarians, and it resides in alliance. Unlike in the US,
coalition politics in the UK allowed for the compromise necessary to
tackle an issue so easy to politicize for partisan gain:
counterterrorism policies instituted after 9/11. Similar ideas of
partnership that allowed the British coalition government to roll back
state powers are now being openly considered by progressives and
libertarians in the US.
“I believe in coalitions,” Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) told Judge Andrew
Napolitano, host of Fox Business Channel’s Freedom Watch, in an
appearance with former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader
recently.
During an earlier interview with Napolitano, Nader said the
libertarian-progressive alliance has already begun, pointing to Paul’s
joining forces with Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to
audit the Federal Reserve and cut military spending. And across the
web, especially at The Freeman, leading American libertarians like
Sheldon Richman and Steven Horwitz[15] have been highlighting the
common values and beliefs shared by progressives and libertarians. In
a piece for a UK libertarian web site, Richman described
left-libertarianism fraternally[16], painting it as a movement that
loves liberty and opposes all forms of cronyism and privilege. Nader
calls this coalescing popular front “the most exciting new political
dynamic” in America today. According to Paul, Nader, Richman and
Horwitz, progressives and libertarians both understand that America’s
diminishing freedoms are not the product of terrorist threats, but of
a welfare-warfare state run amok.
There’s a strange sense of history repeating itself in all of this.
Nearly 250 years ago, the embers of liberty that first burned brightly
in English hearts jumped the great ocean and caused a fire that
changed history. The real question now is whether a small, motley
group of Americans once again is up for taking British ideas and
radicalizing them for a New World.
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Scary Stuff
Internet ‘kill switch’ bill gets a makeover
- Declan McCullagh
A Senate proposal that has become known as the Internet “kill switch”
bill was reintroduced this week, with a tweak its backers say
eliminates the possibility of an Egypt-style disconnection happening
in the United States.
As CNET reported last month, the 221-page bill hands Homeland Security
the power to issue decrees to certain privately owned computer systems
after the president declares a “national cyberemergency.” A section
in the new bill notes that does not include “the authority to shut
down the Internet,” and the name of the bill has been changed to
include the phrase “Internet freedom.”
“The emergency measures in our bill apply in a precise and targeted
way only to our most critical infrastructure,” Sen. Susan Collins
(R-Maine) said yesterday about the legislation she is sponsoring with
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn). “We cannot afford to wait for a cyber
9/11 before our government finally realizes the importance of
protecting our digital resources.”
But the revised wording continues to alarm civil liberties groups and
other critics of the bill, who say the language would allow the
government to shut down portions of the Internet or restrict access to
certain Web sites or types of content. Even former Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak didn’t actually “shut down” the Internet: at least at
first, a trickle of connections continued.
“It still gives the president incredible authority to interfere with
Internet communications,” ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson
said today. If the Department of Homeland Security wants to pull the
plug on Web sites or networks, she said, “the government needs to go
to court and get a court order.”
That concern was punctuated by a report yesterday that Homeland
Security erroneously seized 84,000 Web domains and took them offline.
Former congressman Bob Barr, now an NRA board member and newspaper
columnist, wrote that the mistake shows that “no government–no matter
how benign or well-meaning–should be empowered to control the
Internet.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation said today that it
continues to have concerns about the Lieberman-Collins bill. “The
president would have essentially unchecked power to determine what
services can be connected to the Internet or even what content can
pass over the Internet in a cybersecurity emergency,” said EFF Senior
Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “Our concerns have not changed.”
Some of the companies and industry groups listed as supporting last
June’s version of the bill, before the protests in Egypt, the FBI’s
push on Internet wiretapping, and the Justice Department’s campaign
for Internet data retention, stopped short of endorsing the revised
version. Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance,
pointed to his letter to the Senate committee last year saying the
legislation “is in need of additional refinement.” Clinton said in an
e-mail today that “much more needed to be done before we could support
enactment.”
Microsoft said it did not have a position on the legislation. “The
bill language just came out, and so we really need to review it before
we can provide further comment,” a representative said today.
From “Protecting Cyberspace” to “Internet Freedom”
Many portions of the revised bill, also sponsored by Sen. Tom Carper
(D-Del.), are generally uncontroversial, dealing with topics such as
boosting the federal government’s information security, recruiting
federal “cybersecurity personnel,” and funding research into secure
versions of Internet protocols. (The bill previously was called the
Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act; as part of its makeover
it’s been renamed the “Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act.”)
But all of the recent attention has been focused on the sections
handing the president emergency powers. The new version follows the
same process as the old one: President Obama would be given the power
to “issue a declaration of a national cyberemergency.” Once that
happens, Homeland Security would receive sweeping new authorities,
including the power to require that so-called critical companies
“shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action”
decreed.
No “notice” needs to be given “before mandating any emergency measure
or actions.” That means a company could be added to the “critical”
infrastructure list one moment, and ordered by Homeland Security to
“immediately comply” with its directives the next. The U.S. Senate’s
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Lieberman
chairs, appears to believe that it’s not necessary to include explicit
judicial review of the president’s emergency authority once exercised,
believing it’s implicit. Any such lawsuit filed by a targeted company
would likely focus on language saying the emergency decrees should be
“the least disruptive means feasible.”
The president may declare a “cyberemergency” for 30 days, and extend
it for one 30-day period, unless Congress votes to approve further
extensions.
Homeland Security will “establish and maintain a list of systems or
assets that constitute covered critical infrastructure” and that will
be subject to those emergency decrees. Homeland Security is only
supposed to place a computer system (which could include a server, Web
site, router, and so on) on the list if certain requirements are met.
First, the disruption of the system could cause “severe economic
consequences” or worse. Second, the system is “a component of the
national information infrastructure,” such as the Internet, or relies
on that infrastructure. Third, it can’t be placed on the list “based
solely” on any First Amendment-protected activities.
A committee report from December says that senators hope that Homeland
Security will interpret that language to include a “combination” of
factors, including mass casualties or evacuations, over $25 billion in
damages, or “severe degradation” of national security. The
suggestion, however, appears to be nonbinding and doesn’t actually
appear in the legislation.
One big change: Earlier versions of the bill barred companies from
filing a lawsuit objecting to being placed on that list. The revised
version explicitly permits judicial review as long as the lawsuit is
filed in the District of Columbia. “A state of public peril”
A 1934 law (PDF) creating the Federal Communications Commission says
that in wartime, or if a “state of public peril or disaster or other
national emergency” exists, the president may “authorize the use or
control of any…station or device.” That could sweep in the
Internet, but it’s not entirely clear it does. (The revised bill says
that existing authority may not be used to “shut down the Internet,”
but does not otherwise limit it.)
In congressional testimony last year, the Obama administration
stopped short of endorsing the Lieberman-Collins bill. The 1934 law
already addresses “presidential emergency authorities, and Congress
and the administration should work together to identify any needed
adjustments to the act,” DHS Deputy Undersecretary Philip Reitinger
said, “as opposed to developing overlapping legislation.”
A draft Senate proposal that CNET obtained in August 2009 authorized
the White House to “declare a cybersecurity emergency,” and another
from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine)
would have explicitly given the government the power to “order the
disconnection” of certain networks or Web sites. House Democrats have
taken a similar approach.
In a statement, Lieberman said there’s no “kill switch” in this bill.
“It is impossible to turn off the Internet in this country,” he said.
“This legislation applies to the most critical infrastructures that
Americans rely on in their daily lives–energy transmission, water
supply, financial services, for example–to ensure that those assets
are protected in case of a potentially crippling cyberattack.”
The ACLU’s Richardson believes the problem was never a “kill switch.”
She said: “The question is bigger than that. It’s generally, can the
government interfere with communications… The question is: Are there
significant protections in there?”
Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the free-market
Cato Institute and a member of a Homeland Security advisory panel,
says that supporters of the bill have yet to make the argument that
such governmental emergency powers will do more good than harm. “They
recognize that a total Internet kill switch is totally unacceptable,”
Harper said today. “A smaller Internet kill switch, or a series of
kill switches, is also unacceptable… How does this make cybersecurity
better? They have no answer.”
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*** Breaking News!
ID card data crushed
Earlier today, the final vestiges of the national ID card register
were destroyed.
Under the watch of the Minister of State with responsibility for
dismantling the ID card scheme Damian Green MP, the 500 hard disk
drives containing the personal details of the 15,000 misguided souls
who had actually wanted an ID card were fed into an industrial
shredder. The ‘remains’ will be incinerated shortly.
WIth this, let’s hope we can now draw a line under this sad period for
civil liberties in the United Kingdom.
UPDATE: The Home Office has released some delicious footage of Damian
Green personally destroying the hard disks:
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Good News
‘Big blow to police powers’
- cyprus-mail.com
The Supreme Court decision to declare unlawful the disclosure of
telecommunications data has dealt a big blow to the police’s ability
to investigate serious crime, said police spokesman Michalis
Katsounotos yesterday.
“The tools and weapons available to the Cyprus police for the purposes
of tackling serious crime have been significantly restricted,” he
said.
In a decision on Tuesday, the top court declared unconstitutional the
law providing for the disclosure of telecommunications data for the
purposes of investigating serious crime.
“The whole issue as outlined in the extensive Supreme Court decision
is purely of a legal nature,” said Katsounotos.
“Unfortunately, the decision affects in a large and substantial way
the work and mission of the police, particularly in relation to the
outcome of major cases that are either in the process of investigation
or in court,” he added, noting that court orders were secured for the
disclosure of telecommunications data in all those cases.
He clarified that police were acting within the law when securing that
data, as provided for by the telecommunications data act, passed by
parliament in 2007. The bill was passed as part of Cyprus’ obligation
to harmonise with EU directive 2006/24/EC.
“On the instructions of police chief Michalis Papageorgiou, the
decision will be studied in depth by the assistant police chief and
all under investigation or criminal proceedings will be identified for
which a court order was secured for the disclosure of
telecommunications data, so that in consultation with the
Attorney-general, a decision can be taken on the further handling of
them,” he said.
Katsounotos argued that it was in the public interest, particularly
regarding “the sound administration of justice” for ways to be found
for police to hold on to evidence collected to date on the basis of
the existing law, which has now been declared unconstitutional.
This evidence was necessary in court, he said, adding, “we are
confident that parliament and the Attorney-general will enter into
consultations and do everything possible towards finding legitimate
and effective solutions.”
The Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling regarding the legality of
court orders issued for the disclosure of telecommunications data by
the district courts of Nicosia, Limassol and Larnaca on the request of
police investigating serious crimes.
These orders concerned four people, Soteri Athinis, currently serving
a lengthy prison sentence, Anna Athinis, Christos Matsias and Andreas
Alexandrou.
The applicants claimed violations of their individual rights to
privacy and a family life while arguing the constitution provided for
the confidentiality of communications.
Having considered the provisions of the law, directive, constitution
and case law, the Supreme Court ruled that the provisions in the law
providing access to telecommunications data was not for the purpose of
harmonising with the EU directive.
“Such an obligation does not arise or is not required by the
Directive,” said the Court.
The Court rejected the application by Soteris Athinis on police
illegality, ruling this was an exception since he was banned from
using a mobile phone in prison.
However, in the case of Anna Athini, telephone data disclosure was
“illegal and should be annulled” while for Christos Matsias and
Andreas Alexandrou, court orders for disclosing telephone numbers and
calls should also be annulled, ruled the Court.
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*** Did you know?
Information Commissioner hits London councils with GBP150k fine
According to reports in The Guardian the Information Commissioner has
imposed fines of GBP80,000 and GBP70,000 respectively on Ealing and
Hounslow councils for violations of data protection laws following the
theft of two laptops holding personal information about 1,700 local
residents.
The Information Commissioner is right to act so decisively against
these two councils. For far too long, councils have viewed protecting
the data of residents as an afterthought rather than an issue of
paramount importance.
The size of the fine should serve to put other councils on notice and
send a clear message that such breaches are no longer acceptable. As
BBW have long argued, it is crucial that councils work closely with
the ICO to improve staff training to ensure that the data security
concerns are paramount in the minds of their employees.
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*** ACLU slams Chicago’s pervasive surveillance system
- Agence France-Presse
A vast network of high-tech surveillance cameras that allows Chicago
police to zoom in on a crime in progress and track suspects across the
city is raising privacy concerns. Chicago’s path to becoming the
most-watched US city began in 2003 when police began installing
cameras with flashing blue lights at high-crime intersections.
The city has now linked more than 10,000 public and privately owned
surveillance cameras in a system dubbed Operation Virtual Shield,
according to a report published Tuesday by the American Civil
Liberties Union.
At least 1,250 of them are powerful enough to zoom in and read the
text of a book. The sophisticated system is also capable of
automatically tracking people and vehicles out of the range of one
camera and into another and searching for images of interest like an
unattended package or a particular license plate.
“Given Chicago’s history of unlawful political surveillance, including
the notorious ‘Red Squad,’ it is critical that appropriate controls be
put in place to rein in these powerful and pervasive surveillance
cameras now available to law enforcement throughout the City,” said
Harvey Grossman, legal director of the ACLU of Illinois.
The Chicago police “Red Squad” program from the 1920s through the
1970s spied on and maintained dossiers about thousands of individuals
and groups in an effort to find communists and other subversives.
Outgoing mayor Richard Daley has long championed the cameras as
crime-fighting tools and said he would like to see one on every street
corner.
Chicago police say the cameras have led to 4,500 arrests in the last
four years. But the ACLU said the $60 million spent on the system
would be better spent filling the 1,000 vacancies in the Chicago
police force.
It urged the city to impose a moratorium on new cameras and implement
new policies to prevent the misuse of cameras, such as prohibiting
filming of private areas like the inside of a home and limiting the
dissemination of recorded images.
“Our city needs to change course, before we awake to find that we
cannot walk into a book store or a doctor’s office free from the
government’s watchful eye,” the ACLU said. A police spokeswoman said
the department regularly reviews its policies and maintains an “open
dialogue” with the ACLU.
“The Chicago Police Department is committed to safeguarding the civil
liberties of city residents and visitors alike,” Lieutenant Maureen
Biggane said in an e-mail. “Public safety is a responsibility of
paramount importance and we are fully committed to protecting the
public from crime, and upholding the constitutional rights of all.”
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Food for thought
From a reader!
Wednesday, I approached my truck from the passenger side to
place my computer case in the front passenger seat.
As I reached to open the door I noticed there was a hole right under
my door handle. My first thought was, “someone has shot my truck !”
I began to think about it and inspect it a little closer and the
“light” slowly began to come on.
I phoned my friend who owns a body shop and asked if he had any
vehicles with damage to the doors that looked like a bullet hole.
“Yes, I see it all the time. Thieves have a punch and place it right
under the door handle, knock a hole through, reach in and unlock it,
just as if they have a key.
No alarms, broken glass or anything.
I then placed a call to my insurance agent and explained it to him
I was puzzled that they left my GPS and all other belongings.
Here is where it gets scary!
“Oh no, he said, they want the break-in to be so subtle that you
don’t even realize it.
They look at your GPS to see where “home” is.
Now they know what you drive, go to your home, and if your vehicle
isn’t there they assume you aren’t and break in your home.”
He says they will even leave a purse or wallet and only take one or
two credit cards.
By the time you realize there has been a theft, they may have
already had a couple days or more to use them.
I didn’t realize my situation for two full days!
They even give you the courtesy of re-locking your doors for you.
Periodically walk around your car, daily if you are in a shopping
center or other parking area.
Report thefts immediately….your bank w/missing check numbers,
your credit card agencies, police, and insurance companies, etc.
(Below is picture of what the hole looks like)
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Horror Stories
Is this the next generation of Taser? Prison to test new laser beam
to ‘burn’ fighting inmates
- Daily Mail
It looks like something out of a video game, but this monstrous
machine could come in very handy for breaking up prison fights.
The Assault Intervention Device (AID) emits an invisible laser-like
beam to trigger a brief but painful burning sensation and has been
touted as a new type of Taser gun. Officials plan to set up the
machine in a detention centre dormitory in Castaic, California,
although it has not yet been given the green light by its federal
sponsor.
The AID was first unveiled last summer, but its federal backers – the
National Institute of Justice (NIJ) – have decided to review the
project further before moving forward. Non-lethal weapons such as
‘pain rays’ and Tasers are controversial and human rights groups fear
they can be misused and may even be fatal on vulnerable people.
‘This device allows us to stop a fight or lessen the severity of it
without inflicting injury,’ Commander Bob Osborne, of the Los Angeles
County Sheriff’s Department, said. ‘In terms of pain, it’s like
brushing against a hot stove or an iron. You instinctively yank your
hand away, and then you look at (your hand) and there’s nothing there.
‘You go: “Boy, that’s hot, but I’m not injured,” and that’s what we
love about the device. All the other tools we have hurt people.’
A video shows Los Angeles prison guards having fun as they try it out
on each other, despite the hit being ‘excruciatingly painful’.
The AID is a directed-energy weapon with a beam in the spectrum’s
invisible range, which penetrates just 0.02inches (0.4mm) into the
skin – down to pain receptors.
The machine is operated with a computer monitor, crosshair mark and
joystick with a trigger.
It fires up to 100ft for a few seconds for each trigger press, and
holding down the trigger will not produce continuous fire.
Manufacturers Raytheon say it does not cause burning or nerve damage.
The firm also produces the Silent Guardian machine, which has been
sold to the U.S. military.
The 7.5ft machine would be installed on trial in the North County
Correctional Facility at the Pitchess Detention Center, which houses
around 65 inmates.
But it has been criticised for being too bulky and expensive.
‘This device isn’t what we want the device of future to look like,’ Mr
Osborne said. ‘It’s way too big and costly, it’s too hard to install
and it has too much equipment.
‘Before anybody does a whole lot of work to miniaturise this thing,
the question that needs to be asked is: “Does it work in real life?”
‘It works in labs and when people are pretending to be angry and
violent, but we don’t know if it works if someone is really assaulting
somebody.’
The trial is funded by the NIJ – the Department of Justice’s research,
development and evaluation agency.
Mr Osborne added: ‘We’re not rooting for a fight to break out. But if
violence does occur, we’d like to deal with it in an appropriate
manner.’
Watch a video of the Assault Intervention Device in action at
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*** The District of Criminals
Obama assertion: FBI can get phone records without oversight
- McClatchy Newspapers
The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the
FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the
U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according
to a document obtained by McClatchy.
That assertion was revealed, perhaps inadvertently, by the
department in its response to a McClatchy request for a copy of a
secret Justice Department memo.
Critics say the legal position is flawed and creates a potential
loophole that could lead to a repeat of FBI abuses that were supposed
to have been stopped in 2006.
The controversy over the telephone records is a legacy of the Bush
administration’s war on terror. Critics say the Obama administration
appears to be continuing many of the most controversial tactics of
that strategy, including the assertion of sweeping executive powers.
For years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI sought and obtained
thousands of telephone records for international calls in an attempt
to thwart potential terrorists.
The bureau devised an informal system of requesting the records from
three telecommunications firms to create what one agent called a
“phone database on steroids” that included names, addresses, length of
service and billing information.
A federal watchdog later said a “casual” environment developed in
which FBI agents and employees of the telecom companies treated
Americans’ telephone records so cavalierly that one senior FBI
counter-terrorism official said getting access to them was as easy as
“having an ATM in your living room.”
In January 2010, McClatchy asked for a copy of the Office of Legal
Counsel memo under open records laws after a reference to it appeared
in a heavily excised section of a report on how the FBI abused its
powers when seeking telephone records.
In the report, the Justice Department’s inspector general said “the
OLC agreed with the FBI that under certain circumstances (word or
words redacted) allows the FBI to ask for and obtain these records on
a voluntary basis from the providers, without legal process or a
qualifying emergency.”
In its cover letter to McClatchy, however, the OLC disclosed more
detail about its legal position, specifying a section of a 1978
federal wiretapping law that the Justice Department believes gives the
FBI the authority. That section of the law appears to be what was
redacted from the inspector general’s report and reveals the type of
records the FBI would be seeking, experts said.
“This is the answer to a mystery that has puzzled us for more than a
year now,” said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney and expert on
electronic surveillance and national security laws for the nonprofit
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“Now, 30 years later, the FBI has looked at this provision again and
decided that it is an enormous loophole that allows them to ask for,
and the phone companies to hand over, records related to international
or foreign communications,” he said. “Apparently, they’ve decided
that this provision means that your international communications are a
privacy-free zone and that they can get records of those
communications without any legal process.”
That interpretation could be stretched to apply to e-mails as well, he
said.
However, Bankston said, even if the law allows the FBI to ask for the
records, an assertion he disagrees with, it would prohibit the
telecommunication companies from handing them over.
Meanwhile, the refusal to provide to McClatchy a copy of the memo is
noteworthy because the Obama administration, in particular the OLC
has sought to portray itself as more open than the Bush
administration. The decision not to release the memo means the
details of the Justice Department’s legal arguments in support of the
FBI’s controversial and discredited efforts to obtain telephone
records will be kept from the public.
The FBI and Justice Department have refused to comment on the matter.
For years, the Bush administration had refused to release the memos
that provided the legal underpinning for harsh interrogations of
overseas terror suspects, citing national security, attorney-client
privilege and the need to protect the government’s deliberative
process.
In April 2009, the Obama administration released four of the Bush-era
memos that detailed many of the controversial interrogation methods
secretly authorized by the Bush administration, from waterboarding to
confining prisoners in boxes with insects. Experts that track
government spying and the Freedom of Information Act said the refusal
to release the FBI memo to McClatchy appears to be improper and
contrary to the intent of FOIA.
Since the memo appears to be exclusively on the OLC’s legal
justification for getting the phone records, the Justice Department
should be able to release at least portions of it, experts said.
“It’s wrong that they’re withholding a legal rationale that has to do
with the authorities of the FBI to collect information that affects
the rights of American citizens here and abroad,” said Michael German,
a former FBI agent of 16 years who now works for the American Civil
Liberties Union. “The law should never be secret. We should all
understand what rules we’re operating under and particularly when it
comes to an agency that has a long history of abuse in its collection
activities.”
Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., demanded more
than a year ago that Attorney General Eric Holder release a copy of
the memo.
The Justice Department has responded, Wyden said this week, but he
declined to elaborate on the exchange.
“I do think the level of secrecy that surrounds the executive branch’s
interpretation of important surveillance law is a serious problem,” he
told McClatchy, “and I am continuing to press the executive branch to
disclose more information to the public about what their government
thinks the law means.”
When President Barack Obama authorized the release of the
interrogation memos, he said at the time that he was compelled to
release them in part because of an open records lawsuit by the ACLU.
“While I believe strongly in transparency and accountability, I also
believe that in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes
carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is
classified for purposes of national security,” he said. Obama said
he’d concluded the documents could be released because they wouldn’t
jeopardize national security and because the interrogation techniques
described in the memos had been widely reported. By then, the
practices were no longer in use.
The FBI’s activities discussed in the most recent and still secret OLC
memo also have been widely publicized. An inspector general report
that revealed the existence of the FBI memo was one in a series on the
FBI’s informal handling of telephone records and it concluded the
bureau had committed egregious violations of the law.
When revealing the existence of the OLC memo, the inspector general
described it as having “significant policy implications that need to
be considered by the FBI, the Department, and the Congress.”
Since 2006, it appears the bureau has refrained from using the
authority it continues to assert, according to another heavily
redacted section of the inspector general’s report. “However, that
could change, and we believe appropriate controls on such authority
should be considered now, in light of the FBI’s past practices and the
OLC opinion,” the inspector general warned.
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*** The Sweet Sound of Cash
- Bill Rounds
Protecting your personal privacy is a lifestyle choice. Developing
the habits and practices that are conducive to privacy give you more
control over which aspects of your life are made known to whom. One
key way to do this is to use cash for as many transactions as
possible.
*Benefits Of Using Cash*
One of the biggest returns on privacy for the effort invested to gain
privacy is probably by using cash for as many transactions as
possible, whether it is payment or receipt of funds. The paper trail
which follows such transactions vanishes into anonymity when you use
cash. It is almost impossible to link you to a transaction, whether
you are looking at your own financial records or the records of a
merchant. All reporting requirements for tax and other purposes
should still be followed, but even this only reveals some information
about the aggregate amount of cash that has changed hands.
The benefits to the average person can be enormous. In the
unfortunate event that your bank records or statements are
compromised, the cash transactions will appear only as withdrawals or
deposits and there will be no way of telling where that money came
from or went. The more cash transactions, the fewer the bits of
information that are available from looking at your statements. Using
cash instead of credit or debit cards also keeps the damage from
compromised statements to a minimum. However, with credit card
companies, not using them to make purchases, or carefully selecting
which purchases to make with a credit card, also means that your
transaction information will not be in the hands of marketers and
other “affiliates” of the credit card company. If you are really
sneaky you could carefully craft which expenses you pay with credit
cards and which ones you pay with cash so that marketers and anyone
else who has access to your purchases will only have the profile that
you yourself have painted.
*An Unfortunate Example*
A rather dramatic example of how one should use cash to make a
purchase is found in the experience of Sally Harpold
She was prosecuted under Indiana state drug laws for purchasing one
box of Zyrtec for her husband and, a few days later, one box of
Mucinex for her daughter. Both medications are available
over-the-counter, but the Indiana law prohibits the purchase of more
than a certain amount of medicine containing ephedrine or
pseudoephedrine within a seven-day period. Without her knowledge, she
had purchased two medications which, combined, exceeded the statutory
limit. Although she had never had legal trouble before, had no intent
to commit a crime, and was not committing an act that is wrong or
immoral in and of itself, she was prosecuted. In order to have her
record expunged, she was forced to pay for the cost of the criminal
prosecution.
This extremely bad decision by county prosecutor Nina Alexander to
enforce a poorly worded law in a manner which was never intended would
have been avoided had Mrs. Harpold made one or both of those purchases
with cash. A cash transaction would have left the purchase of the
over the counter medication in this example completely anonymous,
impossible to connect to Mrs. Harpold.
*Caveats*
There are some caveats to using cash as often as possible. Cash is
almost impossible to recover if stolen so having enough cash on hand
to pay your expenses can raise security concerns. Also, banks and
other institutions must file Currency Transaction Reports for any
transaction or series of transactions that are greater than $10,000.
They also file Suspicious Activity Reports if they think that your
cash transaction is somehow suspicious.
*Conclusion*
One of the most effective ways to protect privacy is to use cash for
as many transactions as possible. This will go a long way to
protecting both your personal and financial privacy and may even keep
you out of jail.
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*** Police State
Want Lunch? Give Us Your Fingerprints – ‘Big Brother’ fears at
Parliament Hill School
- Camden newjournal
Pupils at one of Camden’s top secondary schools may have to provide
fingerprints to get their school lunches.
Scanners could be installed at Parliament Hill School in Highgate
Road, Highgate, to speed up queues in the canteen.
Replacing the current swipe cards, the cashless system would use
students’ biometric data to record payments for school meals.
If approved, Parliament Hill will become the first state school in
Camden to use the technology as part of students’ daily routine.
Staff say it would save “time and money” by tackling the problem of
lost or broken cards, but critics argue that it is a “softening up”
exercise to condition children to accept a creeping surveillance
society.
Aza Lorentz, a parent who wrote to the New Journal raising concerns
over the proposals, said: “The current photo ID card is sufficient,
and it acts as lunch card as well as identity.
“Pupils could eventually have to sign in every time they use the
library, enter or leave the school. I feel it is a way of making the
younger generation more accepting of controlling technologies.” Judy
Jenkin, another parent parent, added: “I’d like to see how much it
costs because there are other priorities and I don’t really see any
problem with the ID cards. If it’s designed to speed up the lunch
queue, the canteen is about the size of my front room so I don’t think
it will solve the problem.”
Parents have been invited to Parliament Hill next week for a
demonstration of how the system would work.
Cate Hart, director of operations at Parliament Hill, said the “vast
majority” of parents who responded to the consultation supported the
use of the technology.
She added: “Parents and students had expressed concerns about the
speed of the lunchtime service, using swipe cards to pay for lunches.
Cards get lost, damaged and forgotten, which results in frustration
for students and catering staff at the tills.
“There will be inevitable concern about the ‘use’ of fingerprints, but
the image of the fingerprint is taken from the scanner and turned
directly into a ‘number’, which is retained in the system.
“Images of the fingerprints are not stored on the system anywhere.
The number cannot be turned back into a fingerprint.”
She added that governors will make a final decision based on all the
consultation responses and comments from parents.
Students whose parents object will be able to opt out of the system.
The Department for Education (DfE) estimates about 30 per cent of
secondary schools and 5 per cent of primaries across the country use
biometric systems. But Terri Dowti, director of lobby group Action on
Rights for Children, is concerned that these systems could be
vulnerable to hackers.
A DfE spokesman said: “Legislation will be introduced in the Freedom
Bill to ensure that no children’s biometric data are taken, in schools
or colleges, without parental permission. The Bill will give children
the right to refuse to use biometric systems and will ensure that
alternatives are provided for those who opt out of using biometric
technology.”
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Red Hot Product!
Purchase any report (or product) at
http://www.ptshamrock.com/store/sect1.html before March 6th, 2011 and
receive for free Dr. Charles Freeman’s special 11,000 word report
entitled,
“Revealed: Where And How To Legally Buy, Move And Store Gold Abroad.”
This meticulously researched and well written work is perhaps the best
of its kind on legally moving and storing gold outside the grasp of
confiscating governments.
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*** Advisory
France wants new global finance system
RTE.ie
France will help the transition to a global financial system based on
‘several international currencies’, the French Economy Minister said
today.
France, as current head of the Group of 20 countries, will help the
transition to a global financial system based on ‘several
international currencies’, French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde
said today.
Lagarde, speaking ahead of a G20 finance ministers meeting in Paris on
Friday and Saturday, said the world had to move on from the
‘non-monetary system’ it now has to one ‘based on several
international currencies’.
Accordingly, France wants to see less need for countries, especially
the emerging economies, to accumulate huge foreign reserves, she said.
At the same time, international capital flows should be better
regulated and the role of the Special Drawing Rights issued by the
International Monetary Fund should be reinforced by the inclusion of
China’s yuan in the system.
China, whose booming economy now ranks second only to the US in size
after overtaking Japan, has accumulated massive forex reserves of more
than $2.5 trillion on the back of its sustained trade surpluses and
foreign fund inflows.
Washington says the build-up reflects an unfair undervaluation of the
yuan, a charge Beijing rejects.
France has previously said it wanted to see the global financial
system reduce its reliance on the dollar for a more broad-based
arrangement.
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*** Big Brother High
- BigBrotherWatch
Newspapers are alive today with news of a Coventry school which has
been dubbed “Big Brother High” after the headteacher’s decision to
blanket the school grounds with more than 100 CCTV cameras.
There is more CCTV in schools in the UK than anywhere else in the
world, with the number of cameras continuing to increase by the day.
Big Brother Watch has no problem with some use of CCTV in schools,
such as at entrance points in order to check that unscrupulous
individuals are not able to gain access to school grounds, yet it is
clearly wrong for the movements of every teacher and pupil to be
logged at all times. CCTV should be used sparingly to help solve
serious crimes, not to watch school children going about their day.
Any right-thinking person would conclude that Stoke Park’s snooping is
completely over the top. Surely the school be better off spending the
money on educating their pupils, rather than spying on them?
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Dumbing Down
Prostitutes Use Facebook to Drum Up Business
- Stephanie Rabiner
Facebook is good for a lot of things–stalking old boyfriends,
stalking new crushes, ruining your marriage, and apparently
prostitution.
With the Craigslist crackdown on prostitution ads, the number of
prostitutes using Facebook has grown. In fact, in a study of
prostitutes and social media printed in Wired, a Columbia University
professor found that 83% of prostitutes use Facebook to grow and
advertise their business. He predicts that by the end of 2011, it
will be the number one site for those seeking to advertise their
services.
Facebook prostitution may be against the social network’s terms of
service, but it is also improving prostitutes’ service. Men don’t
want to drive through seedy areas of town while leaning out their
windows, according to the study. They’re looking for something a bit
more discreet and professional. And professional is the embodiment of
Facebook prostitution.
Prostitutes using Facebook “can control their image, set their prices,
and sidestep some of the pimps, madams, and other intermediaries who
once took a share of the revenue.” The study notes that this has also
made the trade safer and more lucrative for women. Despite the
positives for women who live a life of prostitution (and the men who
love use them), the use of Facebook brings another dimension to the
crime should one get caught. Prostitutes using Facebook are not only
running afoul of state laws, but are also violating federal law.
The Internet is considered an instrument of interstate commerce, and
is thus subject to Congressional control. Congress has specifically
outlawed the use of an instrument of interstate commerce with the
intent to facilitate, promote, or carry on an illegal activity. This
applies to prostitution.
It’s also against federal law to entice someone to cross state lines
for the purpose of engaging in prostitution–something much more
likely to happen with Facebook prostitution. The first of these
offenses carries a sentence of 5 years; the second 20. Prostitutes
using Facebook no longer just face a night in jail.
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Dumb signs -
DHS Seizes Websites for Merely LINKING to Copyrighted Material
- Eric Blair, Activist Post
Apparently the Department of Homeland Security is now authorized to
rewrite and enforce copyright infringement laws. In a stunning
precedent, the recent round of domain seizures to shut down websites
that allowed illegal streaming of the Super Bowl also included a few
other websites that were seized simply for linking to infringing
content.
Mike Masnick of TechDirt, who received and published a DHS seizure
affidavit, had this to say in a must-read article:
…the affidavit itself is chock full of legal and technical errors,
compounded by assertions-as-facts that seem to have little basis in
reality. This is immensely troubling, especially given that the
specific legal issues here are hardly settled law, and Homeland
Security seems to be acting as if these cases are no brainers,
allowing them to flat out seize domains, even when those websites have
been declared perfectly legal in their home countries.
The biggest problem is that Homeland Security seems to suggest –
without a hint of doubt — that merely linking to infringing content
is criminal copyright infringement. That is a huge stretch. The
affidavit appears to make it clear that it believes that these sites
are guilty of direct criminal copyright infringement, rather than any
sort of contributory copyright infringement.As we’ve discussed in the
past, the courts have tended to say that embedding and linking can be
contributory infringement, but not direct infringement. Homeland
Security and ICE may be in for a bit of legal trouble trying to prove
that embedding is direct infringement.
Until these unprecedented seizures, online copyright infringement was
dealt with by simply asking infringing websites to remove the material
and replace it with a link to the source. Previous cases have
normally been battled out in civil court. Alternative news giant,
Matt Drudge, is currently fighting a seemingly ridiculous civil
lawsuit over linking to news stories.
These new actions by the DHS and the courts seem to be motivated more
by private corporate profits than by actual copyright law.
Nonetheless, the agenda seems to be to make nearly every website that
links to copyrighted material guilty of criminal infringement, thus
justifying arbitrarily blacklisting domains deemed to be in violation
of such a broad precedent. This is yet another Napoleonic
guilty-until-proven-innocent action, apparently displaying the
corporate state’s lack of concern for the rights of individuals and
small businesses. What’s more, it is also another tyrannical tool
being used to control the flow of information.
Additionally, this type of precedent would same to massively change
the Internet as we know it. What’s next, seizing websites that link
to those affiliate sites, like Facebook, Google, or Twitter? Well,
that’s the exact question Masnick investigated in his follow-up
article, “Homeland Security Tries And Fails To Explain Why Seized
Domains Are Different From Google.” Masnick reports on an interview
with a DHS agent in charge of the domain seizures, James Hayes:
In the interview, John Moe asked Agent Hayes a very simple question:
given that these domains were all seized based solely on the fact that
they link to infringing content hosted elsewhere, and all of the same
content is also linked from Google, will the Feds seize Google’s
domain name? Well, more specifically, Moe asks if ICE could seize
Google’s domain name. Amusingly, right after being asked, Hayes
conveniently gets cut off, but he does call back and the question is
asked again.
However, once he gets back, he tries to tap dance around this issue.
Hayes says “no” that ICE will not seize Google’s domain name and
that’s because it’s only targeting sites that “don’t do due diligence”
to make sure that the content they’re linking to isn’t infringing.
There’s a pretty serious problem with this claim in that it’s wrong on
both sides of the equation. First off, Google, as a search engine,
does no due diligence to check that links only go to non-infringing
content. Second, in at least some of the cases (specifically in the
case of dajaz1), we know that it was actually Homeland Security and
folks like Special Agent Hayes who “failed to do their due diligence,”
so the songs named in the ICE affidavit were, in fact, provided by the
labels or representatives of the musicians. In other words, according
to Special Agent Hayes’ own criteria, Google is more of a criminal
operation that Dajaz1.
Despite the DHS’s obvious distortion of the law, we are rapidly
approaching a day where information can no longer flow freely on the
Internet. We better wake up and share these stories with everyone we
know, because tyranny is fast approaching. These words written above
belong to nobody but the open-source, free Internet. Share and
re-post at will.
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Dumb facts
Cambridge University stands up for academic freedom
According to reports on the ARS Technica website, the UK Cards
Association has today gone into melt-down after a Masters student at
the University of Cambridge published an academic paper outlining how
to build a gadget to protect consumers from being hacked while using
their bank card.
The UKCA has written to the university demanding that the student in
question, Omar S. Choudary, remove his thesis from the internet
immediately. According to their spokesman:
“The publication of this level of detail goes beyond the boundary of
responsible disclosure. Essentially, it places in the public domain a
blueprint for building a device which purports to exploit a loophole
in the security of chip and PIN.”
Erm, that’s not Mr Choudary’s problem. Shouldn’t you have built a
system that couldn’t be hacked by a student writing his Master’s
thesis?
Thankfully, Mr Choudary’s tutor Professor Ross Anderson took an
uncompromising position towards the UKA’s demands:
“You seem to think that we might censor a student’s thesis, which is
lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful
interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of
what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of
Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the
powerful is offensive to our deepest values. Thus even though the
decision to put the thesis online was Omar’s, we have no choice but to
back him. That would hold even if we did not agree with the
material!”
Cambridge University should be applauded for standing up to this
audacious by the UKCA to stifle academic freedom.
On another note, you can find the thesis here
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*** Dumb criminal acts
Atlanta police agreed to back off citizens who videotape
- Raw Story
The Atlanta police force will no longer tangle with citizens who
videotape their actions in public, according to a recent settlement
between citizen activists and the city.
“We commend the city for resolving a long-standing problem of police
interfering with citizens who monitor police activity,” Gerry Weber
and Dan Grossman, the lawyers for the activists, told The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution Thursday.
The settlement involved Marlon Kautz, a 27-year-old volunteer with a
group that films police activities called Copwatch. Two officers,
upon taking his camera phone, told Kautz last year he was not allowed
to record them making arrests after a raid of a local business. The
police later returned his device without the pictures.
“The APD has shown time and time again that they do not want the
public to see what they’re doing,” Vincent Castillenti, Copwatch
organizer, said in an advisory.
He continued, “It’s alarming to see police trying to create a veil of
secrecy around their activities, and I think we should all be asking
what it is they’re trying to hide.”
The agreement, pending city council approval, would award Kautz and
Copwatch $40,000 in damages. Also the Atlanta Police Department would
agree to allow citizens to record their officers on duty, as long as
the recording is done without physically obstructing officers.
The APD reported that disciplinary actions were taken on the three
officers involved in the Kautz incident. A citizens advisory board
recommended suspension without pay for four days for Officer Anthony
Kirkman who stripped the phone from Kautz.
Kautz began filming police in East Atlanta two years ago after he
formed a local Copwatch chapter. He told the Journal that a police
raid on a local gay bar drove him to activism.
“We saw Copwatch as direct action we could take to increase police
accountability in the city,” he said.
In 1990, the original Copwatch group formed in California to film
police for citizens’ protection. Recording police activity has been
upheld as constitutionally protected in some cases, but in many cases
officers have treated it as an offense worthy of arrest.
A video of the raid can be viewed on the Copwatch East Atlanta’s
website at
.
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Dumbing Down Awards of the YEAR!
Darwin Awards!
Remember: these people walk among us
and they reproduce!
1. We’ve left the winner for last.
Meantime, the honorable mentions:
2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting
machine and after a little shopping around, submitted a claim to his
insurance company. The company expecting negligence sent out one of
its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also
lost a finger.. The chef’s claim was approved.
3. A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car
during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman
had taken the space. Understandably, he shot her.
4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus
driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be
transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to
admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and
offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the
passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients
were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies.. The deception
wasn’t discovered for 3 days.
5. An American teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious
head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he
received the injuries, the lad told police that he was simply trying
to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was
hit.
6. A man walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the
counter, and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer,
the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which
the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and
fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash
he got from the drawer… $15. [If someone points a gun at you and
gives you money, is a crime committed?]
7. Seems an Arkansas guy wanted some beer pretty badly.. He decided
that he’d just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window,
grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it
over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit
the would-be thief on the head, knocking him unconscious. The liquor
store window was made of Plexiglas. The whole event was caught on
videotape…
8. As a female shopper exited a New York convenience store, a man
grabbed her purse and ran. The clerk called 911 immediately, and the
woman was able to give them a detailed description of the snatcher.
Within minutes, the police apprehended the snatcher. They put him in
the car and drove back to the store. The thief was then taken out of
the car and told to stand there for a positive ID. To which he
replied, “Yes, officer, that’s her. That’s the lady I stole the purse
from.”
9. The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a
Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan at 5 A.M., flashed a gun, and
demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn’t
open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered
onion rings, the clerk said they weren’t available for breakfast…
The man, frustrated, walked away. [*A 5-STAR STUPIDITY AWARD WINNER!]
10. When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a motor home parked
on a Seattle street by sucking on a hose, he got much more than he
bargained for.. Police arrived at the scene to find a very sick man
curled up next to a motor home near spilled sewage. A police
spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline, but
he plugged his siphon hose into the motor home’s sewage tank by
mistake. The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges saying
that it was the best laugh he’d ever had.
1. (The winner:) When his 38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his
intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California, would-be
robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He
peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it
worked.
In the interest of bettering mankind, please share these with friends
and family….unless of course one of these individuals by chance is a
distant relative or long lost friend. In that case, be glad they are
distant and hope they remain lost.
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*** Unbelievable Dumbing Down
Smoking In The Park Banned, Ticketed For Cussing In Class And 14 Other
Examples Of How Big Brother Is Systematically Ripping Our Liberties
And Freedoms Away
- Endofthe American dream
When our founding fathers established this nation, they did so with
the intention that government would be very limited and that there
would be a tremendous amount of liberty and freedom. But today that
is such a distant memory that we don’t even remember what “the land of
the free and the home of the brave” actually means anymore. Our lives
are constrained by literally millions of laws, rules and regulations
and it gets worse every single day. The federal government, state
governments, local governments and even homeowners associations have
become absolutely tyrannical. There is a “law” or a “rule” for almost
everything now, and many of them are absolutely ridiculous. Big
Brother is ripping our liberties and freedoms away from us at a
blistering pace. Just about any activity that you can think of other
than sitting completely still in utter silence in your own home is
tightly regulated by government. This is not what our founding
fathers intended.
There are so many laws, rules and regulations out there today that
nobody can possibly know them all, much less keep them all.
Unfortunately, politics tends to keep attracting new crops of control
freaks that are eager to impose even more ridiculous laws on all of
us.
We have become so tightly controlled and so tightly restrained that
there is very little room for any real freedom in America today. Do
our politicians even know what they mean when they give speeches about
“liberty” and “freedom” anymore? It is almost as if those two words
have completely lost their meaning.
All around us a control grid is being constructed. It was very subtle
at first, but now it has become very much “in our faces”. The TSA
abuse that is going on at airports across the United States is perhaps
the most obvious example, but the truth is that we are constantly
seeing new examples of the encroachment of Big Brother in our lives.
These days there seems to be a never ending parade of new laws, new
security measures, new taxes, new “requirements”, new paperwork and
new ways that the government is trying to control our behavior. It
just seems as though there is an endless hunger for more cameras, more
bureaucrats, more police brutality, more government snooping, more
security and more control.
We can’t claim to be a “free country” while we are living like this.
But very, very few of our politicians are even talking about the need
to get the government off of our backs.
The United States is supposed to be free, but instead we are being
transformed into just another control freak society. Well, the truth
is that the American people don’t want to go down the path that the
Europeans and the Chinese have gone.
We want our liberties and our freedoms back.
The following are 16 examples of how Big Brother is systematically
ripping our liberties and freedoms away from us….
#1 The New York City Council has voted to ban smoking in all public
parks and on all public beaches. Of course smoking is very bad for
the health and most of us wouldn’t dream of smoking, but once upon a
time Americans had the freedom to decide whether they wanted to smoke
or not. Now that freedom is rapidly being lost.
#2 Did the police issue tickets for cussing in class when you were in
high school? Well, it is happening today. A teenager in suburban
Dallas was recently forced to take on a part-time job after being
ticketed for using bad language in one high school classroom. The
original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the
total bill to $637.
#3 It is not just high school kids that are being ticketed by police.
In Texas the crackdown extends all the way down to elementary school
students. In fact, it has been reported that Texas police gave “1,000
tickets” to elementary school kids over a recent six year period.
#4 The level of paranoia in our society has reached staggering
heights. Recently, a 17 year-old honor student in North Carolina
named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father’s lunch with her
to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to
slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the
school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the
year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.
#5 Someday historians will look back and will be amazed at how much
time, money and energy we spent coming up with ridiculous regulations.
A new law requires a carbon monoxide detector to be installed on each
floor of all single-family homes in the state of Colorado. While this
may be a “good idea”, the fact that the government is now forcing us
to do these things under penalty of law just shows how much control
they now have over the smallest details of our lives.
#6 Even the smallest offenses can result in brutal police violence
these days. In Fairfax County, Virginia one man was shot and killed
by police when they came to arrest him for betting on college football
games.
#7 Want to record your interactions with police in order to protect
yourself in court? Be careful. In some states it is actually illegal
to film the cops arresting you. For example, in the city of Chicago,
one artist now faces up to 15 years in prison for recording his own
arrest by police.
#8 In some areas of the country, it is now actually a crime to not
recycle properly. For example, the city of Cleveland has announced
plans to sort through trash cans to ensure that people are actually
recycling according to city guidelines. That is how extreme our
control freak society has become.
#9 Not cooperating with the “authorities” can get you into a lot of
trouble these days. In Washington D.C., if you do not submit to
“random bag checks” while riding the Metro, there is a good chance
that you could receive a follow-up visit by the FBI or by the
Department of Homeland Security.
#10 If you make too much noise in your backyard in America today you
may get tasered. For example, some time ago cops brutally tasered two
adults, including a pregnant woman, in front of a yard packed with
young children because the police felt that their Baptism party was
making too much noise and they weren’t being cooperative enough with
police.
#11 If you make food “incorrectly” there is a good chance that you
will get raided by the federal government. In fact, the feds recently
raided an Amish farmer at 5 AM in the morning because they claimed
that he was was engaged in the interstate sale of raw milk in
violation of federal law.
#12 Oh, and you had better watch your lawn very, very carefully. A
few years ago a 70 year old grandmother was actually put in handcuffs
and hauled off to jail for having a brown lawn.
#13 Freedom of speech is just a memory in many areas of the United
States today. In fact, police in many areas of the country seem to
have absolutely no idea what the U.S. Constitution requires when it
comes to free speech. On June 18th of last year, two Christians
decided that they would peacefully pass out copies of the gospel of
John on a public sidewalk outside a public Islamic festival in
Dearborn, Michigan and within three minutes 8 policemen surrounded
them and placed them under arrest.
#14 Today you can even be locked away for reading your spouse’s email.
A Michigan man has been charged with a felony and could face up to 5
years in prison for reading his wife’s email.
#15 If you take too long to pull over for police in some areas of the
United States, you could end up bloody and tasered. One 58 year-old
woman in Utah learned this lesson very clearly after a cop punched her
repeatedly in the face.
#16 In the United States today, you can’t even feed the homeless
without a permit. In Houston, Texas a couple named Bobby and Amanda
Herring that had been feeding homeless people for over a year has been
banned by the city from doing so. They were told that they needed a
permit to feed the homeless and city officials say that they are not
going to get one.
This is what America has turned into. Even something as basic as
feeding your fellow man has become all about “regulations” and
“permits”.
We seem to have lost all of our common sense. We have allowed hordes
of “control freak” bureaucrats to reign over us.
We have become a society that is so paralyzed by our own rules that we
can barely even function anymore.
John Adams, the second president of the United States, once said the
following…. “Children should be educated and instructed in the
principles of freedom.”
But instead of instructing them about liberty and freedom we teach
them how to be good servants of the system.
Somewhere along the line we have lost what it truly means to be
Americans. Hopefully the American people can recapture those
principles before it is too late.
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*** In Shadow of a Past Failure, BSA Database Overhaul Takes Shape
- Brian Monroe
An effort by the country’s financial intelligence unit to take
ownership of Bank Secrecy Act data managed by the IRS appears to be on
track, according to industry observers and the U.S. Treasury
Department.
The project, headed by the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement
Network (FinCEN) and dubbed the “BSA IT Modernization,” will allow
over 300 law enforcement agencies to more efficiently search the
bureau’s database of financial regulatory filings. The overhaul,
which was launched in 2009, is expected to cost the bureau $100
million before an expected finalization in 2014, according to FinCEN
officials and budget documents.
The revamp will mean changes for financial institutions as well, which
will have to train employees on how to file new XML-based, “dynamic”
reports on suspicious activity and currency transactions. The
electronic forms would require financial institutions to choose from
dozens of types of financial crimes and instruments via pull-down
windows, under FinCEN proposals.
The modernization program is “moving ahead and on track,” FinCEN
spokesman Steve Hudak said, in an e-mail. The overhaul, which has
cost $17.8 million to date, involves “planning, rebuilding, and
migrating the database, moving millions of existing records into the
modernized structure,” according to www.usaspending.gov, a government
site that tracks spending projects.
Plans to revamp how FinCEN collects and disseminates Bank Secrecy Act
(BSA) data from financial institutions have been in the works since at
least early February 2003, when the bureau launched the first
feasibility assessments of its failed BSA Direct Retrieval and Sharing
program.
The 2003 effort was plagued by weak project management and contractor
staffing issues that arose months into the program’s launch, according
to a Jan. 5 report by the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector
General. FinCEN officials stifled criticisms of the project by the
department’s chief information officer and MITRE Corp., a
not-for-profit company that consults on government IT projects,
according to the report.
Former FinCEN Director Robert Werner ultimately pulled the plug on BSA
Direct in July 2006 after nearly $8.4 million in cost overruns.
Similar delays with the more ambitious IT Modernization project are
unlikely this time around, according to a former Treasury Department
official with firsthand knowledge of BSA Direct. Close oversight,
including the creation of a dedicated project management department at
FinCEN, is evidence of a “new rigor that will make sure a project of
this scope does not go off track,” said the person, who asked not to
be named.
To better manage the project, FinCEN hired “a number” of senior staff,
including an agency chief information officer and a program manager,
as well as created a project management office to guide and assess the
overhaul’s progress, FinCEN Executive Director James Freis said, in a
Nov. 8 letter to the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector
General.
FinCEN’s IT division has “gotten better direction” on how to manage
projects and realizes “there are checks in the system” on how money is
spent and progress is measured, said a former bureau employee with
knowledge of the latest overhaul. “They are not guys at FinCEN with
their legs up on their tables. They are incredibly busy and trying to
institute the big vision” of current and prior FinCEN directors.
The bureau, which has created a test environment for the database and
released beta versions of new analytical tools to its analysts, is in
the development phase of the project, according to a Dec. 29 report
by the Treasury Department’s chief information officer. In July,
FinCEN completed a “full load” of BSA data onto the new system from
the IRS, according to www.usaspending.gov.
Overall, the revamp was 10 percent over-budget in July due to delays
in contractor training, but remains on schedule and is likely to be
completed at near budget estimates, according to government reports.
Once completed, FinCEN’s e-filing system for suspicious activity and
currency transaction reporting would require banks and other companies
to choose from among 26 types of financial instruments and more than
40 crimes, under bureau plans. Compliance departments would need to
specify, for example, whether a suspect transaction involved a life
settlement plan or was a payment for off-track betting.
In some cases, including proposed changes for designation of exempt
person reports, the XML-system would include “pre-populated” data
fields.
The new reporting standards will give investigators “more meaningful
results” when searching SARs and other filings, according to a former
contractor with the Treasury Department who worked on BSA Direct.
Currently, SAR data not written according to standardized
indexing-with a misplaced period or incorrect spacing, for example-may
not show up in search results, the person said.
“The upgrade is long overdue and will take FinCEN to the next step by
having autonomy over the data,” said the former contractor.
It has been frustrating for FinCEN to “be the stepchild” of the IRS
when it comes to managing the BSA database, said the former Treasury
Department official.
Revisions to the database are “done on IRS’ schedule, their budget and
when they want to,” said the person. “It puts FinCEN in the
backseat.”
That relationship between the IRS and FinCEN has not been without its
share of critics. In January 2009, the U.S. Government
Accountability Office criticized the two agencies for poorly securing
the shared BSA database from hackers and other potential privacy
breaches. Compliance officers and bank officials who have reviewed
FinCEN’s proposed changes to its electronic reporting fields have said
that, while the overhaul will make it easier for investigators to mine
the more than eight million SARs and other regulatory reports housed
by the bureau, the plan will also increase the time it takes to file
the forms.
In its Oct. 15 proposal on SAR fields, FinCEN estimated that
compliance officers would spend a total of two hours filling a single
report to the new database. That estimate is likely inaccurate,
according to various compliance officers, who said that current
reports can average over five hours to complete and may take longer
under the proposal.
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*** Patriot Act extension fails in the House by seven votes
- Washington Post
House rejects Patriot Act extension
More than two-dozen House Republicans bucked their party to oppose the
measure that would extend three key provisions in the counterterrorism
law.
House Republicans suffered an embarrassing setback Tuesday when they
fell seven votes short of extending provisions of the Patriot Act, a
vote that served as the first small uprising of the party’s tea-party
bloc.
The bill to reauthorize key parts of the counter-terrorism
surveillance law, which expire at the end of the month, required a
super-majority to pass under special rules reserved for
non-controversial measures.
But it fell short of the required two-thirds after 26 Republicans
bucked their leadership, eight of them freshman lawmakers elected in
November’s midterm elections. With most Democrats opposing the
extension, the final tally was 277 members in favor of extension, and
148 opposed.
The Republicans who control the House made plans to bring the measure
back for a quick vote later this month under normal rules, requiring
only a simple majority for passage. They blamed House Democrats for
the bill’s downfall, noting that they provided the lion’s share of
votes against a bill that President Obama supports.
The vote was the latest signal, though, that on certain matters House
leaders could face a sizable resistance to compromise from within
their own ranks, both from the 87 GOP freshmen and from conservative
veterans who have been emboldened by the newcomers.
Earlier Tuesday, House Republicans pulled a bill to extend assistance
to workers who lose jobs due to competition from imports.
Conservatives had complained that the bill would put the federal
government too squarely into the private economy.
And leaders of the Appropriations Committee heard complaints Tuesday
from fellow Republicans on the panel that their bill to slash at least
$32 billion in fiscal year 2011 spending was insufficient.
The Patriot Act measure would have extended through the end of the
year three provisions that are set to expire Feb. 28. One authorizes
the FBI to use roving wiretaps on surveillance targets; the second
allows the government to access “any tangible items,” such as library
records, in the course of surveillance; and the third allows for the
surveillance of targets who are not connected to an identified
terrorist group.
Democrats hailed the day’s events under a press release from Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office asking a simple question: “Disarray?”
Shamrock’s comment: You can bet your bottom dollar this Patriot Act
will 100% for sure be renewed.
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Cannon Fodder
Judge’s Husband Fined $50K Over Homestead Exemption
Records: Judge, Husband Took Exemption On 2 Properties
- Judge Mindy Glazer
Hollywood, Fla. – A Miami-Dade County judge has been caught up in a
homestead exemption property tax scandal. David Gaynor, the husband
of Circuit Court Judge Mindy Glazer had to pay $50,000 to the Broward
County property appraiser in back taxes and penalties.
“There was no explanation,” said Ron Cacciatore, of the Broward
Property Appraiser’s Office. “They just wanted us to remove the
penalties and interest, which we wouldn’t do.” Cacciatore, who heads
up Broward’s homestead exemption fraud unit, said that from 2004 to
2009, Glazer and Gaynor claimed the tax break on two properties at the
same time, which saved them thousands on their annual property tax
bill. Records show Gaynor had a homestead exemption on his unit in
the Renaissance condominium on AIA in Hollywood since 2001.
In 2004, a year after he married Glazer, the couple bought a condo
together on Collins Avenue on Miami Beach and took the homestead
exemption there, too, according to investigators. Records show Glazer
applied for the tax break in Miami-Dade County but left her husband’s
Social Security number off the application. “Social Security is very
important because the Department of Revenue, they send it to us and
say, ‘Hey, this Social Security number is down in Dade County and this
Social Security number is in Broward on homesteads.
It raises a red flag,” Cacciatore said. Local 10′s Roger Lohse
attempted to speak to Glazer. She did not return phone calls and,
when he tried to go to her office on the 20th floor of the Family
Courthouse in downtown Miami, she refused to give security permission
to let him come upstairs. Court spokeswoman Eunice Sigler released
this statement on Glazer’s behalf:
“This matter involves property owned by Mr. David Gaynor prior to his
marriage. The homestead exemption issue was an oversight by Mr.
Gaynor and, once discovered, was immediately corrected.” “If
(someone) is cheating, you and I pay more,” Cacciatore said.
Cacciatiore said Gaynor immediately paid the $50,000 in back taxes and
penalties.
Broward’s property appraiser, Lori Parrish, said her office his
committed to making sure everyone pays their fair share of the
county’s property tax base. “We don’t make the rules, but we will
enforce them, and we will treat everybody exactly alike,” Parrish
said. “It doesn’t matter who you are.” Gaynor told Local 10 it was
an honest mistake, that he believes in paying taxes, and that he was
happy to write the $50,000 check to the county because he knows they
need it.
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Oz Corner:
Australia moves to ban workplace snooping
News reports from Australia this morning at
suggest that moves may be afoot to ban employers from monitoring their
staff’s internet and e-mail accounts on work computers.
“Queensland Attorney-General Cameron Dick said it was time to
safeguard workers who unknowingly had their emails read and internet
use monitored by unreasonable bosses.
“Companies are also monitoring social network sites and using
information to sack staff even if they are posting messages at home
and don’t mention their employer.
“In December told a federal parliamentary hearing into privacy [heard]
that even a decade ago a survey by a major law firm found that 64 per
cent of Australian employers who responded covertly monitored the
emails of employees.
“Lawmakers say they are determined to stop any such abuse. The state
and federal attorneys-general have been working on a set of workplace
privacy guidelines since 2009 but Mr Dick said he would introduce his
own code, regulations or law if national progress was not made soon.
“If agreement can’t be reached, Queensland will then need to consider
how it will proceed to address legitimate workplace privacy concerns”.
In the case of many companies, their internal IT departments have
moved to limit employee access to social networking websites during
office hours and to control the the kind of language which can be used
over e-mail. While such is undoubtedly annoying for the employees
involved, an employer should retain the right to limit which
information can and cannot be accessed on their computer systems.
Indeed, such an approach is far preferable to those employers who
scrupulously monitor the content accessed by their staff and establish
elaborate monitoring systems in order to detect emails containing
certain key words and phrases.
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Bug Bites:
This Search Engine Enjoys Too Much Power And Control Over The Internet
Not To Mention It’s Egregious Violations Of Peoples’ Privacy.
The Dirty Little Secrets of Search
- The New York Times
Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media examined J. C. Penney’s ranking
on Google. His analysis suggested a world of intrigue in the search
business.
Google’s spam cop, Matt Cutts, was not pleased about a campaign to
make JCPenney.com seem more popular.
Someone types the word “dresses” and hits enter. What will be the
very first result? There are, of course, a lot of possibilities.
Macy’s comes to mind. Maybe a specialty chain, like J. Crew or the
Gap. Perhaps a Wikipedia entry on the history of hemlines. O.K., how
about the word “bedding”? Bed Bath & Beyond seems a candidate. Or
Wal-Mart, or perhaps the bedding section of Amazon.com.
“Area rugs”? Crate & Barrel is a possibility. Home Depot, too, and
Sears, Pier 1 or any of those Web sites with “area rug” in the name,
like arearugs.com.
You could imagine a dozen contenders for each of these searches. But
in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny
regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:
J. C. Penney.
The company bested millions of sites, and not just in searches for
dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or
near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter
sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the
blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet
top curtains”).
This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through
the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J.
C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for
the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on
luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list,
ahead of Samsonite.com.
With more than 1,100 stores and $17.8 billion in total revenue in
2010, Penney is certainly a major player in American retailing. But
Google’s stated goal is to sift through every corner of the Internet
and find the most important, relevant Web sites. Does the collective
wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site
when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of
other words and phrases?
The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of
Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as
Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months.
What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the
Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the
intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat”
optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with
methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.
Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not
illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The
company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers
deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of
consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s
visibility. Penney’s results were derived from methods on the wrong
side of that line, says Mr. Pierce. He described the optimization as
the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has
ever seen.
“Actually, it’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of,” he
said. “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a
major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that
would know better.”
TO understand the strategy that kept J. C. Penney in the pole
position for so many searches, you need to know how Web sites rise to
the top of Google’s results. We’re talking, to be clear, about the
“organic” results, in other words, the ones that are not paid
advertisements. In deriving organic results, Google’s algorithm takes
into account dozens of criteria, many of which the company will not
discuss.
But it has described one crucial factor in detail: links from one site
to another. If you own a Web site, for instance, about Chinese
cooking, your site’s Google ranking will improve as other sites link
to it. The more links to your site, especially those from other
Chinese cooking-related sites, the higher your ranking. In a way,
what Google is measuring is your site’s popularity by polling the
best-informed online fans of Chinese cooking and counting their links
to your site as votes of approval.
But even links that have nothing to do with Chinese cooking can
bolster your profile if your site is barnacled with enough of them.
And here’s where the strategy that aided Penney comes in. Someone
paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered
around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com.
Who is that someone? A spokeswoman for J. C. Penney, Darcie
Brossart, says it was not Penney.
“J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or
aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is
against our natural search policies,” Ms. Brossart wrote in an e-mail.
She added, “We are working to have the links taken down.” The links
do not bear any fingerprints, but nothing else about them was
particularly subtle. Using an online tool called Open Site Explorer,
Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,”
“evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on
any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced
directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.
Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to
clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney
link were tacked to the bottom of a site called
nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site
called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on
bulgariapropertyportal.com. “Casual dresses” was on a site called
elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather
incongruously, on usclettermen.org.
There are links to JCPenney.com’s dresses page on sites about
diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring,
diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games,
commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and
dentists and the list goes on.
Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links. The
greeting at myflhomebuyer.com sounds like the saddest fortune cookie
ever: “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.”
When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the
landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts
to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings,
surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other
than the ads that are painted on their walls.
Exploiting those hovels for links is a Google no-no. The company’s
guidelines warn against using tricks to improve search engine
rankings, including what it refers to as “link schemes.” The penalty
for getting caught is a pair of virtual concrete shoes: the company
sinks in Google’s results.
Often drastically. In 2006, Google announced that it had caught BMW
using a black-hat strategy to bolster the company’s German Web site,
BMW.de. That site was temporarily given what the BBC at the time
called “the death penalty,” stating that it was “removed from search
results.”
BMW acknowledged that it had set up “doorway pages,” which exist just
to attract search engines and then redirect traffic to a different
site. The company at the time said it had no intention of deceiving
users, adding “if Google says all doorway pages are illegal, we have
to take this into consideration.”
J. C. Penney, it seems, will not suffer the same fate. But starting
Wednesday, it was the subject of what Google calls “corrective
action.”
Last week, The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about
the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with
Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google, and a man whose
every speech, blog post and Twitter update is parsed like papal
encyclicals by players in the search engine world.
“I can confirm that this violates our guidelines,” said Mr. Cutts
during an hourlong interview on Wednesday, after looking at a list of
paid links to JCPenney.com.
He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to
JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each
time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results Mr.
Cutts avoids the word “punished” but Google did not later “circle
back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he
said. He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links,
which he said had been up and running for the last three to four
months.
“Do I wish our system had detected things sooner? I do,” he said.
“But given the one billion queries that Google handles each day, I
think we do an amazing job.”
Mr. Cutts sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this
conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a
large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his
zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger.
You get the sense that Mr. Cutts and his colleagues are acutely aware
of the singular power they wield as judge, jury and appeals panel, and
they’re eager to project an air of maturity and judiciousness.
That said, he added, “I don’t think I could do my job well if in some
sense I was not offended by things that were bad for Google users.”
“Am I happy this happened?” he later asked. “Absolutely not. Is
Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.”
And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls
a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically
aimed at the company.
At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No.
1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.”
Two hours later, it was at No. 71.
At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for “living
room furniture.” By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.
In other words, one moment Penney was the most visible online
destination for living room furniture in the country.
The next it was essentially buried.
PENNEY reacted to this instant reversal of fortune by, among other
things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex.
Executives there did not return e-mail or phone calls.
Penney also issued a statement: “We are disappointed that Google has
reduced our rankings due to this matter,” Ms. Brossart wrote, “but we
will continue to work actively to retain our high natural search
position.”
She added that while the collection of links surely brought in
additional revenue, it was hardly a bonanza. Just 7 percent of
JCPenney.com’s traffic comes from clicks on organic search results,
she wrote. A far bigger source of profits this holiday season, she
stated, came from partnerships with companies like Yahoo and Time
Warner, from new mobile applications and from in-store kiosks.
Search experts, however, say Penney likely reaped substantial rewards
from the paid links. If you think of Google as the entrance to the
planet’s largest shopping center, the links helped Penney appear as
though it was the first and most inviting spot in the mall, to
millions and millions of online shoppers.
How valuable was that? A study last May by Daniel Ruby of Chitika, an
online advertising network of 100,000 sites, found that, on average,
34 percent of Google’s traffic went to the No. 1 result, about twice
the percentage that went to No. 2.
The Keyword Estimator at Google puts the number of searches for
“dresses” in the United States at 11.1 million a month, an average
based on 12 months of data. So for “dresses” alone, Penney may have
been attracting roughly 3.8 million visits every month it showed up as
No. 1. Exactly how many of those visits translate into sales, and
the size of each sale, only Penney would know.
But in January, the company was crowing about its online holiday
sales. Kate Coultas, a company spokeswoman, wrote to a reporter in
January, “Internet sales through jcp.com posted strong growth in
December, with significant increases in traffic and orders for the key
holiday shopping periods of the week after Thanksgiving and the week
before Christmas.”
There was considerable pressure from investors for Penney to deliver
strong holiday results. It has been struggling through one of the
more trying times of its century of retailing. The $17.8 billion in
revenue it reported last year is the exact same figure it reported in
2001. It announced in January that it would close a handful of
underperforming stores, as well as two of its five call centers and 19
outlets that sell excess catalog merchandise.
Adding to the company’s woes is the demise of its catalog business.
Penney has phased out what it called its Big Book and poured money
into its Web site. But so far, the loss of the catalog has not been
offset by the expansion of the Web site. At its peak, the catalog
brought in about $4 billion in revenue. In 2009, the site brought in
$1.5 billion.
“For the last 35 years, Penney has tried to be accepted as a
department store, and during unusually good times, it does very well,”
said Bernard Sosnick, an analyst at Gilford Securities. “But in bad
times, it gets punished by shoppers who pull back after having spent
aspirationally.”
Many owners of Web sites with Penney links seem to relish their
unreachability. But there were exceptions, and they included
cocaman.ch. (“Geekness closer to the world” is the cryptic header
atop the site.) It turned out to be owned and run by Corsin Camichel,
a chatty 25-year-old I.T. security analyst in Switzerland.
The word “dresses” appears in a small collection of links in the
middle of a largely blank Cocaman page. Asked about that link, Mr.
Camichel said his records show that it turned up on his site last
April, though he said it might have been earlier than that. The link
came through a Web site, TNX.net, which pays Mr. Camichel with TNX
points, which he then trades for links that drive traffic to his other
sites, like cookingutensils.net. He earns money when people visit
that site and click on the ads. He could also, he said, get cash from
TNX. Currently, Cocaman is home to 403 links, all of them placed
there by TNX on behalf of clients.
“You do pretty well,” he wrote, referring to income from his links
trading. “The thing is, the more you invest (time and money) the
better results you get. Right now I get enough to buy myself new test
devices for my Android apps (like $150/month) with zero effort. I
have to do nothing. Ads just sit there and if people click, I make
money.” Efforts to reach TNX itself last week via e-mail were not
successful.
Interviewing a purveyor of black-hat services face-to-face was a
considerable undertaking. They are a low-profile bunch. But a
link-selling specialist named Mark Stevens who says he had nothing
to do with the Penney link effort agreed to chat. He did so on the
condition that his company not be named, a precaution he justified by
recounting what happened when the company apparently angered Google a
few months ago.
“It was my fault,” Mr. Stevens said. “I posted a job opening on a
Stanford Engineering alumni mailing list, and mentioned the name of
our company and a brief description of what we do. I think some
Google employees saw it.”
In a matter of days, the company could not be found in a Google
search.
“Literally, you typed the name of the company into the search box and
we did not turn up. Anywhere. You’d find us if you knew our Web
address. But in terms of search, we just disappeared.”
The company now operates under a new name and with a profile that is
low even in the building where it claims to have an office. The
landlord at the building, a gleaming, glassy midrise next to Route 101
in Redwood City, Calif., said she had never heard of the company.
Mr. Stevens agreed to meet in mid-January for a dinner paid for by The
Times. Asked to pick a “fine restaurant” in his neighborhood, he
rather cheekily selected a modern French bistro in Palo Alto offering
an eight-course prix fixe meal for $118. Liquid nitrogen and “fairy
tale pumpkin” were two of the featured ingredients.
Mr. Stevens turned out to be a boyish-looking 31-year-old native of
Singapore. (Stevens is the name he uses for work; he says he has a
Chinese last name, which he did not share.) He speaks with a slight
accent and in an animated hush, like a man worried about
eavesdroppers. He describes his works with the delighted, mischievous
grin of a sophomore who just hid a stink bomb.
“The key is to roll the campaign out slowly,” he said as he nibbled at
seared duck foie gras. “A lot of companies are in a rush. They want
as many links as we can get them as fast as possible. But Google will
spot that. It will flag a Web site that goes from zero links to a few
hundred in a week.”
The hardest part about the link-selling business, he explained, is
signing up deep-pocketed mainstream clients. Lots of them, it seems,
are afraid they’ll get caught. Another difficulty is finding quality
sites to post links. Whoever set up the JCPenney.com campaign, he
said, relied on some really low-rent, spammy sites the kind with low
PageRanks, as Google calls its patented measure of a site’s quality.
The higher the PageRank, the more “Google juice” a site offers others
to which it is linked. “The sites that TNX uses mostly have low
PageRanks,” Mr. Stevens said.
Mr. Stevens said that Web site owners, or publishers, as he calls
them, get a small fee for each link, and the transaction is handled
entirely over the Web.
Publishers can reject certain keywords and links Mr. Stevens said
some balked at a lingerie link but for the most part the system is
on a kind of autopilot. A client pays Mr. Stevens and his colleagues
for links, which are then farmed out to Web sites. Payment to
publishers is handled via PayPal.
You might expect Mr. Stevens to have a certain amount of contempt for
Google, given that he spends his professional life finding ways to
subvert it. But through the evening he mentioned a few times that
he’s in awe of the company, and the quality of its search engine.
So how does he justify all his efforts to undermine that engine?
“I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of
searches informational and commercial,” he said. “If you search
‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is
amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really
polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the
biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest.”
To Mr. Stevens, S.E.O. is a game, and if you’re not paying black
hats, you are losing to rivals with fewer compunctions.
WHY did Google fail to catch a campaign that had been under way for
months? One, no less, that benefited a company that Google had
already taken action against three times? And one that relied on a
collection of Web sites that were not exactly hiding their spamminess?
Mr. Cutts emphasized that there are 200 million domain names and a
mere 24,000 employees at Google.
“Spammers never stop,” he said. Battling those spammers is a
never-ending job, and one that he believes Google keeps getting better
and better at.
Here’s another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last
year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of
its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney.
The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid
Google search ads the kind you see next to organic results.
Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive
black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers?
It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now
studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.
Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like
this: “Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your
advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your
ranking in Google’s natural search.” And: “Has Google ever mentioned
to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your
ranking in Google’s natural search?”
Asked if Penney received any breaks because of the money it has spent
on ads, Mr. Cutts said, “I’ll give a categorical denial.” He then
made an impassioned case for Google’s commitment to separating the
money side of the business from the search side. The former has zero
influence on the latter, he said.
“If you asked me for the names of five people in advertising
engineering, I don’t think I could give you the names,” he said.
“There is a very long history at Google of saying ‘We are not going to
worry about short-term revenue.’ ” He added: “We rely on the trust of
our users. We realize the responsibility that we have to our users.”
He noted, too, that before The Times presented evidence of the paid
links to JCPenney.com, Google had just begun to roll out an algorithm
change that had a negative effect on Penney’s search results. (The
tweak affected “how we trust links,” Mr. Cutts said, declining to
elaborate.)
True, JCPenney.com’s showing in Google searches had declined slightly
by Feb. 8, as the algorithm change began to take effect. In
“comforter sets,” Penney went from No. 1 to No. 7. In “sweater
dresses,” from No. 1 to No. 10.
But the real damage to Penney’s results began when Google started that
“manual action.” The decline can be charted: On Feb. 1, the average
Penney position for 59 search terms was 1.3.
On Feb. 8, when the algorithm was changing, it was 4.
By Feb. 10, it was 52.
Mr. Cutts said he did not plan to write about Penney’s situation, as
he did with BMW in 2006. Rarely, he explained, does he single out a
company publicly, because Google’s goal is to preserve the integrity
of results, not to embarrass people.
“But just because we don’t talk about it,” he said, “doesn’t mean we
won’t take strong action.”
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*** Currency exchange: baby boomer expats send wave of money flooding
back into Britain The number of people selling property abroad to buy
back home is rising steeply.
Liz Phillips looks at the dramatic turnaround.
- The Telegraph
In the last year there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of
expats cashing in and sending money back to the UK. The evidence from
foreign currency exchange specialists is overwhelming. At Moneycorp
there’s been a four-fold increase in the number of expats in Europe
returning to the UK compared with 2009. At the same time, the number
selling properties in Europe has tripled.
And the pace is picking up. The number of World First clients
converting funds to pounds to buy property in the UK increased 4.5
times, or 350 per cent, between August and November 2010. HiFX has
seen a 175 per cent increase in the number of euro to sterling
transactions, and a 120 per cent increase in the number of US dollar
to sterling transactions in the past six months, compared to the same
period last year.
What is going on?
Mark Bodega of HiFX says: “The original baby boomers who bought
overseas are now choosing to downsize their foreign properties as they
get older.
“The overseas property market really took off about 20 years ago when
the first tranche of Brits started looking for their dream home in the
sun, particularly in France and Spain.
“These people are either downsizing to smaller properties, or selling
their holiday homes now that their families have grown up, and are
sending the money home.”
Three-quarters of Britons repatriating money from France are over 55,
and two-thirds repatriating money from Spain are over 55.
One Currency Solutions client who bought in France in 2002 when the
pound bought 1.65 has sold up, making a 30 per cent profit even
though his holiday home has not appreciated since 2008.
Director Christina Weisz says: “In fact, anyone who bought prior to
the crash in 2008, and managed to avoid depreciation, is now at least
22 per cent better off due to the exchange rate.
“So even if the investment hasn’t appreciated, they should still see a
real term gain if they chose to crystalize their profit.”
Some expats are taking advantage of the weak pound to use the equity
in their foreign home to invest in buy-to-let properties in Britain.
Unsurprisingly, the sums being converted back into pounds are large.
Almost a third of transactions over GBP70,000 have been made by those
aged 65 and older in the last six months, according to HiFX.
But while it’s good news for some, retired expats living on their
pensions all over the world have seen their income slashed by the
depreciation in the pound in the past two years.
Worst hit are pensioners in South Africa, New Zealand and Australia,
where they’ve been hit with a double whammy of a weak pound and local
inflation.
For instance, a British pensioner with an average state pension of
GBP628 a month in Australia would have been able to exchange it for
AU$1,700 in October 2008. Now it would only buy AU$996, a fall of
AU$704 a month, says HiFX.
In New Zealand, the drop is $594, while in South Africa the amount
received in local currency has almost halved over the same time. In
comparison, European pensioners have escaped relatively lightly,
seeing a fall of 79, with $262 in the States.
Only pensioners in the EU receive increases in British state pensions,
the others are left with pensions frozen at the same level as when
they emigrated.
An action group of 13 pensioners is taking its case to the European
Court of Human Rights to ask for their pensions to be inflation
proofed. Until they succeed, millions of retired expats will continue
to feel the pinch.
Find more handy tips on transferring money between countries with our
currency exchange guide at
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Shamrock’s Missive:
If you feel stuck in the US and don’t know where to turn, here’s a
mighty good idea that might save you and your families ass…ets. When
departing the U.S. to any foreign country, you are subject to
currency reporting, under severe penalty, if you have negotiable
monetary instruments in the form of currency, endorsed personal
checks, traveler’s checks, gold coins, securities or stocks in bearer
form, valued at $10,000 or more in your possession. If you do have
$10,000 or more, then you are required to file a “Report of
International Transportation of Currency or Monetary Instruments” form
FinCEN 105 and submit it to a US customs officer prior to your
departure from the United States.
However, and here’s the good news, monetary instruments that are made
payable to a named person but are not endorsed or which bear
restrictive endorsements are not subject to reporting requirements,
nor are credit cards with credit lines of over $10,000. Gold bullion
is not a monetary instrument for purposes of this requirement.he
requirement to report monetary instruments on a FinCEN 105 does not
apply to exports of gold bullion.
A 10-ounce gold bullion bar of .995 fine purity is the standard
industry unit. Also available are 32.15 troy ounce gold “kilobar”.
At current market value a single 32.15 kilobar is worth US$44,624.20
[gold @ US$1,388 per ounce times 32.15 ounces.]
A kilogram is about 2.2 pounds. Therefore if you took 5 kilobar’s
with you (11 pounds in your carry-on baggage) then you would have
US$223,121 in non reportable assets with you.
Now the question is where do you take this? You’ll need a safe and
secure place to store your gold for a raining day, and frankly, it
looks like a mega storm is coming in the near future. Perhaps more
important is not everyone has a quarter of million dollars to buy and
move gold bullion overseas nor has the time or ability to travel
abroad at this time!
A long time colleague, Dr. Charles Freeman, best selling author of
“How To Legally Obtain a Second Passport,” has written a special
11,000 word report called, “Revealed: Where And How To Legally Buy,
Move And Store Gold Abroad.” This meticulously researched and well
written work is perhaps the best of its kind on legally moving and
storing gold outside the grasp of confiscating governments.
Unlike most articles on similar topics, the author is not selling
anything. Rather he’s presenting the information in a plain easy to
follow and thorough manner including contact details with valuable
little known information. This report is for both the beginner who
wants to send or obtain a few thousand dollars worth of gold overseas,
to the person wishing to place a quarter million or more worth of gold
abroad.
Our colleague has graciously given us permission to offer this report
as a “free bonus” to those readers who take advantage of this issue’s
Red Hot Product.
See you next issue
Shamrock
“The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.”
- Edmund Burke, 1784
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Tid Bits
Tax Exodus Begins
- UK Daily Telegraph
One in eight people registered in Britain as non-resident for tax
purposes left the country in the last year for which HM Revenue &
Customs (HMRC) has records.
The 12 per cent decrease during the year to April, 2009, demonstrates
that tax-driven emigration is not just an option for companies like
Wolseley, the FTSE-listed plumbing group that said this week it is
leaving Britain for Switzerland and simpler, lower taxes. Accountants
say the decline in non-resident numbers reflects HMRC’s tougher stance
toward wealthy individuals and its campaign to raise revenues. HM
Revenue & Customs (HMRC) defines non-resident taxpayers as individuals
who spend less than 183 days in the UK during the tax year or whose
visits to the UK do not average 91 days or more a tax year over a
maximum of four years.
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Quotes
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like
unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are
within full of dead [men's] bones, and of all uncleanness.”
- Matthew 23:27
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Memorable Quotes
“Innovation, once the province of the developed West, and especially
the USA, is now too “Made in China.” In 2009, the Chinese processed
some 600,000 patents, compared to 480,000 in the US. China plans to
raise that figure to one million by 2015 and double the number of its
patent examiners to 9,000, while currently in the US there are only
6,300 such examiners.”
- Trends Journal
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*** Quotes
“Every man is entitled if he can to arrange his affairs so that the
tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise
would be. If he succeeds in ordering them as to achieve that result,
then so as to secure that result, then however unappreciative the
Commissioners of the Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of
his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax.”
- Lord Tomlin in IRC v Duke of Westminster, 1936
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And other Quotes:
“A problem is a chance for you to do your best.”
- Duke Ellington, jazz legend.
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Even More Quotes
“As third world conditions descend over Empire America, so too will
Americans descend into third world behavior.
- Trends Journal
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Thought provoking quotes:
“Who could have imagined that the impoverished China of Mao’s 1970s
Cultural Revolution would become the world’s second largest economy in
2010 … rocketing past Germany and Japan?”
- Gerald Celente
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*** Tid Bits
The Social Security Disaster
- Wealth Cycles
The average retirement age is measured in spans of five years for
accuracy.
Of the people that are retiring, how many are completely or
semi-dependent on the government? Social Security is a very sore
subject for many. People have been working for decades, only to see
FICA taxes taken away from their paychecks with the promise of a plan
that would take care of their retirement needs.
U.S. Social Security is the largest government program in the history
of the world and it has enormous liabilities to those taxpayers who
have paid into it. According to the Social Security Administration,
over the next 75 years, Social Security is underfunded by $5.4
trillion meaning that Social Security has made promises that exceed
its assets by the size of Japan’s entire economy.
The year 2010 was the date set as the tipping point for Social
Security; the point when Social Security would take in less than it
spent, making it cash flow-negative and forcing Social Security to
borrow from Congress, which has already spent the original trust fund
that Social Security had build up. If this doesn’t make sense don’t
worry – it is the equivalent of you writing yourself a check and
hoping that it increases your overall assets. It makes no sense
whatsoever, but the government will try it anyway.
Social security payouts have grown faster than FICA tax revenues and
are now burdening our economy. How much longer can this flawed system
last?
There are two possibilities for saving the Social Security system and
that is either to increase taxes or to reduce benefits. Is increasing
taxes really an option for an economy struggling with immense amounts
of debt and such high unemployment?
Reducing benefits is as big a political issue as there, with
entrenched political agendas battling over incremental changes instead
of the dramatic changes necessary to remake Social Security.
As life expectancy increases people will live longer, demanding
benefits over a longer and longer period.
The U.S. retirement age has fallen over the years in the United
States. But because of our recent Financial Crisis and the monetary
issues around the corner, huge numbers of people are going to have to
work through their golden years.
While Social Security is underfunded by $5.4 trillion over the next 75
years, it is underfunded by $16 trillion (larger than the size of the
U.S. economy) over the long term. Can the flawed system be
revitalized or will Social Security be the thing that brings this once
great nation down?
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*** Bits n bobs
Food Crisis 2011? 14 Disturbing Facts That Make You Wonder If The
Coming Global Food Shortage Has Already Begun
- The American Dream
Will 2011 be the year that we point to as the beginning of the great
global food crisis? Food prices are soaring, supplies are very tight
and already we have seen some very intense food protests flare up
around the globe this year. When people don’t have enough to eat,
they tend to become very desperate, and unfortunately it looks like
the global food situation is not going to improve much any time soon.
Right now the world is really struggling to feed itself, and with each
passing day there are even more mouths to feed. It is being projected
that the population of the world will reach 9 billion people by the
year 2050. There are already way too many people starving to death
around the globe, and unfortunately starvation is only going to become
more rampant as food supplies get even tighter. Some of the key food
producing provinces in China are facing their worst drought in 200
years. Flooding has absolutely devastated agricultural production in
Australia and Brazil this winter. Russia is still trying to recover
from the horrific drought of last summer. Global weather patterns
have gone haywire over the past 12 months, and this is putting immense
pressure on a global food system that was already on the verge of a
major breakdown.
Food stockpiles all over the world are disturbingly low at this point.
If a major global famine broke out not even the United States would be
able to last for long. The U.S. government is supposed to be keeping
a lot of food stockpiled in the event of an emergency, but that is
just not happening.
Right now a desperate scramble for food is beginning. Quite a few
nations that used to be huge food exporters are now importing a lot of
their food. Prices for staples such as wheat, corn and soybeans are
absolutely soaring, and the UN is projecting that they will continue
to rise rapidly throughout 2011.
Unless something dramatically changes, the global food situation is
only going to get tighter and tighter and tighter as this decade rolls
along.
So who is going to decide who gets fed and who doesn’t?
As food prices continue to rise, will we start to see more food riots
erupt all over the world as starving populations demand answers from
their governments?
What is going to happen if weather patterns get even worse or if we
have a string of really bad natural disasters?
What is going to happen if we experience a really bad global economic
collapse?
Right now these are just the “birth pains”, but if things get much
worse we could be looking at a horrific food shortage that will rock
the globe.
The following are 14 facts that make you wonder if the coming global
food shortage has already begun .
#1 According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. corn
reserves will drop to a 15 year low by the end of 2011.
#2 The United Nations says that the global price of food hit another
new all-time high in the month of January.
#3 The price of corn has doubled in the past six months.
#4 The price of wheat has roughly doubled since the middle of 2010.
#5 According to Forbes, the price of soybeans is up about 50% since
last June.
#6 The United Nations is projecting that the global price of food will
increase by another 30 percent by the end of 2011.
#7 Due to all of the unprecedented flooding, the winter wheat crop in
Australiahas been absolutely devastated.
#8 This winter Brazil was hit by some of the worst flooding that
nation has ever seen. This has substantially hampered food production
in that country.
#9 Russia, one of the largest wheat producers on the entire globe, is
still feeling the effects of last summer’s scorching temperatures. In
fact, Russia is actually importing wheat this winter to sustain its
cattle herds.
#10 China is busy preparing for a “severe, long-lasting drought” that
is projected to have a huge impact on several provinces. In fact,
Chinese state media says that the eastern province of Shandong is
dealing with the worst drought it has seen in 200 years. The
provinces being affected by this severe drought grow approximately
two-thirds of the wheat in China. The following is a very short video
news report about the horrible drought that China is going through
right now….
#11 It appears that Chinese imports of corn will be about 9 times
larger than the U.S. Department of Agriculture originally projected
them to be for 2011.
#12 Approximately 1 billion people around the world go to bed hungry
each night.
#13 Somewhere in the world someone starves to death every 3.6 seconds,
and 75 percent of those are children under the age of five.
#14 As food has become increasingly scarce around the world, many
companies have started using whatever kinds of “fillers” that they can
think of in their “food” products. For example, Raw Story is
reporting that some companies in China have actually been mass
producing “fake rice” that is made partly of plastic. According to
one Chinese Restaurant Association official, eating three bowls of
this fake rice is the equivalent of consuming an entire plastic bag.
Let us pray that this is not the beginning of a major global food
crisis, because hunger and starvation are horrible things.
Starving to death is a fate that nobody should ever have to go
through.
So, let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare as if we will be
facing the worst.
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*** Gov’t Considering Rolling Back Rule Allowing Private Planes to
Keep Flights Secret
- Michael Grabell
Most private plane owners would no longer be able to prevent the
public from tracking their flights in real time under a new policy
being considered by the U.S. Department of Transportation, according
to a trade group.
As we reported last year, plane owners can currently keep their flight
information secret for any reason by simply having the trade group
send a request to the Federal Aviation Administration. While that
policy was created for security and competitive business concerns,
ProPublica found a number of individuals and companies that signed up
for the program after receiving bad publicity.
Among them were a televangelist facing a congressional inquiry,
governors who had been questioned about personal trips on state
planes, college athletic programs seeking to hide recruiting trips and
Fortune 500 companies that had received government bailouts. Now, the
government is considering limiting the program to plane owners who can
prove a legitimate security concern, Ed Bolen, president of the
National Business Aviation Association, said in a letter posted
Monday on the group’s website.
When we asked FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown about the letter, she said
only that the agency is “reevaluating” the program. The letter, and
the potential policy change, were first reported Monday night by
Politico.
Use of the national airspace is generally considered public
information because pilots — whether airline captains or recreational
fliers — rely on a system of air traffic controllers, radars, runways
and towers that are paid for or subsidized by taxpayers. As a result,
flight data is collected by the FAA in its air traffic control system.
The program allowing owners to block the information was created
in 2000 after private plane groups complained to Congress about a
number of websites posting real-time government data of planes’
locations and flight schedules.
A measure attached to an FAA reauthorization bill that year required
websites that use the data to exclude any aircraft upon FAA request.
But over the years the process has changed with the business aviation
association telling the FAA and websites which planes to take out of
the system.
Plane owners have two options for keeping their flights secret. In
one, the aviation association sends a “block” list to the FAA, which
removes the planes from data released to the flight-tracking websites.
In the other, the trade group sends a list directly to the websites,
which are bound by FAA agreement to hide the planes.
ProPublica obtained the FAA version of the block list through the
Freedom of Information Act last year after a judge ruled against a
lawsuit by the business aviation group seeking to keep the list
confidential.
In his letter Monday, National Business Aviation Association’s Bolen
said the “onerous limitations” could go into effect as early as Feb.
15. As of last month, however, the group stopped accepting new block
requests. He said the group has conveyed its concerns directly to
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and have requested another meeting
with him this week.
It’s unclear if the government is considering the group’s argument
that disclosure of flights could jeopardize business deals and affect
stock prices. But the group does seem to be focused on how the
exemption for security will be granted. It recently sent its members
a survey asking them if they had employees who qualified under
Internal Revenue Service rules to receive a tax deduction for
employer-provided transportation for security concerns.
The IRS rules use a strict standard requiring a specific
“business-oriented security concern,” such as a threat of death or
kidnapping or a recent history of terrorist activity in the area where
the employee is working. To qualify for the deduction, the employee
must have an overall security program in which bodyguards or
chauffeurs are provided on a 24-hour basis when the employee is both
at work and at home.
Update: We just heard from the National Business Aviation Association
and the group said it is now continuing to process requests to block
planes.
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*** Letters to the Editor:
Keep them postcards and letters coming’ folks, ’cause we
done mailed the rosebushes!
Dear Shamrock:
Thanks! You people are GREAT!!!!
S.L.
Dear Shamrock:
Your newsletters, and especially your reports and products are tops.
Please email me full details on your new offer for an offshore
company and bank account in Dominica.
Thanks in advance.
L.B.
Dear Shamrock:
Can you tell me if your bank in Switzerland is Swissquote? I do not
care for an account with them. They ask too many questions.
Cheers
A.R. in NIR [Northern Ireland Republic.]
Dear A.R. in NIR:
No it’s definitely not. We confirm that our Swiss bank is NOT
Swissquote. Rather it’s a customer friendly bank offering excellent
services at a very reasonable cost for only US$1,350.
Regards
Shamrock
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Quote of the month!
“Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of
freedom.”
- John Adams, Second President of the united States of
America [correct spelling.]
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*** “PT Shamrock’s Exclusive Member’s Site!”
Each month we offer exclusive information, free privacy programs,
access to our newsletter archives and other insider information
for members only.
Our member’s site is accessed by user name and password only. This
is available to our newsletter subscribers ONLY!
Each month the password will change and you will have to e-mail us
from your subscribers e-mail address to request the NEW password in
order to gain access.
As a subscriber to our newsletter you automatically qualify for this
exclusive service. Just send an e-mail to
and place “Members” in the
subject heading. We will forward to you full details for signing up
and gaining access to our Members Site, reserved for you.
Enjoy.
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We’re probably the oldest privacy newsletter on the Internet!
Thank you for your patronage and help in spreading the word.
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ownership of property, and the exchange of ideas.”
PT Shamrock – issue one; 1994
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